You may find that your Surface Pro won’t turn on or wake up from sleep. This is an annoying issue. In this post, MiniTool Software will tell you how to solve this issue in different ways. No matter you are using Surface Go, Surface Book, Surface Laptop, or a Surface Pro, you can use these solutions to have a try.

Microsoft Surface Won’t Turn on or Wake up from Sleep? You Can Fix It Yourself

If your Microsoft Surface Go, Surface Book, Surface Laptop, or a Surface Pro won’t wake up, won’t turn on, or has a black screen without a Surface logo, you need to take some measures to get it working again.

Microsoft Surface won’t turn on or wake up from sleep can be caused by different reasons. So, the solutions are also various. In this article, we focus on how to solve Surface Pro won’t turn on or wake up from sleep and show you some effective solutions.

No matter you are using Surface Pro, Surface Pro 2/3/4/5/6/7/X, Surface Book, Surface Book 2, Surface Laptop, Surface Go, you can try these solutions to help you out.

However, most of the time, you just don’t know the exact reason for this issue. If so, you can just try the following solutions one by one until you find the suitable one.

Solutions to Non-System Issues

If Microsoft Surface Pro won’t turn on or wake up from sleep is not caused by system issues, things will be simple. You can do some checking or perform some simple operations to fix the issue.

Here are some things you can do:

Fix 1: Charge the Surface Device

At times, this issue is just very simple: the battery of the Surface Pro or another Surface device has run out of power.

If you have used the device for a long time without plugging in, it is quite possible that the battery has run out of power.

So, you can plug in the charging cable and then press the Power button to see whether the Surface device can boot successfully. Here, you don’t need to wait until the Surface device is fully charged. A Surface device can be turned on as long as it is connected to a power source.

Fix 2: Check the Charging Cable

However, if your Surface Pro won’t wake up or start even when it is charging, it’s possible that there is something wrong with the charging cable.

How to tell if the charging cable is damaged or not? The easiest and direct way is to check the small LED light that is at the end of the cable and connected to the side of your machine. If the charging cable can function normally, the LED light should be constantly lighting. If not, you should try the following things to see whether the charging cable is damaged:

  • Keep the charging cable plugging into a power source, but disconnect it from your Surface device. Then, plug the charging cable into the device again. If your Surface can turn on, it means that both your Surface and charging cable are fine.
  • Keep the charging cable plugging into your Surface device, but disconnect it from the power source. Then, plug the charging cable into the power source again. If your Surface can turn on, it means that everything is OK and you should not be worried.
  • Connect your Surface device to a power source via the charging cable and then run the length of the cable through your hands. Next, you need to softly bend the cable in different places and keep seeing whether the charging indicator can light up. If the charging indicator flickers when bending the cable, it means that the cable inside is damaged. You need to replace it with a new one. While, if the indicator doesn’t flicker or light up at all, it is quite possible that the Surface device itself is corrupted or damaged.

If your Surface Pro won’t start at all even you have tried these things, you can use the next method to have a try.

Fix 3: Turn on Your Surface with Hot Keys

If you are also using a Type Cover, Touch Cover, or other types of keyboard to operate your Surface machine, you can try to turn on the device by pressing Windows+Shift+Ctrl+B keys at the same time.

If you are in tablet mode, you can quickly press the Volume Up and Volume Down buttons back and forth three times to turn on the device.

However, if this method can’t help you turn on your Surface Pro, you need to move to the next solution.

Fix 4: Remove All Surface Accessories

The external devices that are connected to your Surface can also cause the machine unbootable.

For example, we have introduced a situation of external hard drive freezes computer on our website. One of the solutions to solve the issue is to disconnect the external drive from the machine.

Likewise, you can remove all the external accessories from your Surface device and then reboot your computer to see whether it can boot successfully. The accessories include the keyboard, mouse, external storage drive, etc.

Fix 5: Soft Reset the Surface Device

If the above methods don’t work, you can consider performing a soft reset of your device. This also means forcing restart the Surface device.

Tip: Unlike a hard reset and a factory reset, this method will not affect any files, settings, and programs on your device. You don’t need to recover your data beforehand.

You can follow these steps to perform a software reset on your Surface device:

  1. Press and hold the Power button for about 10 seconds.
  2. Release the Power.
  3. Press the Power button to try to turn on the device.

If your Surface is still not turning on, you will need to try the next solution.

Fix 6: Force Shut Down and Restart the Surface Device

If your Surface device still refuses to turn on or wake up from sleep, you can perform a force shutdown.

Here, you can choose your Surface mode to find specific instructions:

If you are using a Surface Pro, Surface Pro 2, Surface Pro 3, Surface Pro 4, Surface Book

  1. Press and hold the Power button on the device for about 30 seconds until the screen turns off and then release it.
  2. Press and hold the Volume up button and the Power button at the same time for about 15 seconds until the screen turns off, then release both of these two buttons.
  3. You need to wait 10 seconds after you release the buttons. After that, you can press the Power button to turn on your Surface device to see whether it is bootable now.

If you are using a Surface Pro (5th Gen), Surface Pro 6, Surface Pro 7, Surface Pro X, Surface Laptop (1st Gen), Surface Laptop 2, Surface Laptop 3, Surface Go, Surface Go with LTE Advanced

Press and hold the Power button for about 20 seconds until the Surface device restarts. When you see the Windows logo screen, you can release the Power button.

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If your Surface Pro or another Surface device still refuses to turn on, you can consider whether there are system issues that prevent you from booting the machine successfully.

When referring to the system issues, you should first care about the data on the Surface device. To keep them safe, we think you’d better rescue data from Surface beforehand. In the next part, we will show you how to do this job.

Interlude: Rescue Your Files from the Unbootable Surface Device Using MiniTool

You need to use professional data recovery software to rescue your Surface data. MiniTool Power Data Recovery is worth trying.

MiniTool Power Data Recovery is specially designed to retrieve your files from computer hard drives, memory cards, SD cards, etc. Its trial edition, a free file recovery tool, allows you to scan your drive to check whether it can find the files you want to recover.

MiniTool Power Data Recovery TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

Since your Surface Pro or other Surface device is unbootable, the trial edition is unavailable. You need to select one edition that contains a snap-in WinPE bootable builder.

Preparations:

1. You can go to the MiniTool store center to select a suitable edition. If you are a personal user, the Personal Ultimate Edition is a good choice because it allows you to use the software on 3 PCs at the same time and you can enjoy a free lifetime upgrade service.

2. You need to use a normal working computer on which you can build a bootable medium.

Bootable Media

3. You need to set your Surface device to boot from the bootable medium.

4. You still need to prepare an external data storage drive that has enough space to save your computer files.

Data Recovery Process:

When everything is prepared, you can follow these steps to recover files from your Surface Pro or another Surface device:

1. Select the drive you want to recover from and click the Scan button to scanning that drive.

select the target drive to scan

2. It will take a while to finish the whole scanning process. After that, you can see the scan results that are listed by path. Here, you can open each path to find the files you want to rescue. On the other hand, you can also click Type to find files by type or use Find to directly locate your needed files by name.

scan results

3. Now, you can connect the external data storage drive to your computer and then select the files you want to recover.

4. Press Save and then choose an external drive to save the selected data.

Now, your files are safely kept to the external drive. You can feel free to fix the system issues that may cause Surface Pro won’t turn on.

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Solutions to System Issues

System issues, such as damaged MBR, inactive system partition, virus attack, and more, can lead to Surface Pro won’t boot.

If you don’t know what the real reason is, you can try these fixes one by one:

Fix 1: Fix MBR

MBR allows your Surface Pro to locate Windows OS and then boot it. If the MBR is damaged, your Windows will fail to boot. Fortunately, you can fix MBR to make everything go back to normal.

Fix 2: Set the System Partition as Active

Normally, Windows can only boot from the System Partition that is set as active. There should be only one active partition on a hard drive. If a partition, which is not the System Partition, is set as an active partition by mistake, your Surface device will become unbootable.

To rule out this situation, you can go to check whether the System Partition is set as active using the professional partition manager: MiniTool Partition Wizard. If not, you can set it as active to solve the issue.

Fix 3: Fix Some Boot Errors

At times, your Surface Pro just boots into some errors like NTLDR Is Missing, Operating System not found, etc. Or, it just boots into Black Screen of Death or Blue Screen of Death with an Error Code like 0xc000000e, bad pool header, and more.

The specific boot error you receive varies. You can search for it from the MiniTool official site or on Google and then select a suitable solution to fix it.

Fix 4: Perform a System Restore

If you have created a system restore point, the issue can be much easier. You can perform a system restore to roll back your Windows to the point when it can boot normally.

Fix 5: Reinstall Windows 10

Windows 10 installation will install a fresh new Windows 10 on your Surface device. It can replace the corrupted system files that you can’t discover. Reinstalling Windows 10 should be your last choice to fix Surface Pro won’t boot by yourself. But, it is the most effective one.

Fix 6: Ask for Professional Help

If Windows 10 reinstallation can’t solve your issue, the issue should be serious. To avoid serious losses, you can contact Microsoft support for help. Maybe, you will need to use remote support or send your Surface device to a Microsoft official store for repair.

Fix 7: Buy a New Surface Device

If your Surface Pro or another Surface device can’t even be repaired by professionals, you will need to buy a new one.

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Bottom Line

Surface Pro won’t turn on or wake up from sleep is an annoying issue. But, the solutions mentioned in this article can help you solve the issue. We hope they are useful to you.

Should you have any questions when delating with the issue or using MiniTool software, you can contact us via [email protected] or let us know in the comment.

Surface Pro Won’t Turn on FAQ

How do you force restart a Surface Pro?
  1. Press and hold the Power button for about 30 seconds until the screen turns off, and then release it.
  2. Press and hold the Volume up and Power buttons at the same time for about 15 seconds until the screen turns off, then release them.
  3. 10 seconds later, you can press the Power button to turn on the Surface Pro.
How do you reset a Surface Pro?
  1. Go to Start > Settings > Update & Security > Recovery.
  2. Select Get Started under Reset this PC.
  3. Select Keep my files or Remove everything based on your own needs.
Where is the Power button on Surface Pro?
The Power button of Surface Pro is located on the top side of the device screen and on the left side of the volume button.
Why is my Surface Pro not charging?
This issue can be caused by many reasons, such as power outage, the battery is completely drained and it needs five minutes to react, the charging cable is damaged, and more.
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