How Did You Resolve SP3 No Boot Situation?

[BaselTom]

For those who have revived your SP3 that won't boot up, what worked for you? My SP3 i5 256 went dead yesterday and won't boot up. Pressing the power button or the Vol Up + Power only causes the charging cord LED to blink once every 10 seconds.

I have one month remaining on warranty but I'm trying to keep from losing the data on the machine. Hard lesson learned from not backing up or syncing.

 

[leeshor]

There seem to be several possibilities and one of them worked for most people. Ctrl-Alt-Del, Winkey+P (sometimes 3 times), Winkey+B was reported more than once and the method you spoke of.

 

[ScottyS]

I recently had my SP3 go off (I mean screen off, no power on) suddenly when I clicked on icon for Outlook 2016 and when I tried to restart I got the initial screen flash (a bug other threads have discussed) and then after several seconds the Surface logo would come on and after a few seconds it'd go dead again. Holding the power button down for 30 seconds (which I believe forces a shut down when it's really on but with the screen off or in some low power state, and the tips @leeshor mentioned above might work) didn't work and the two button restart didn't work.

So I booted off a USB recovery drive I had made (please everyone, make a USB recovery drive! When you need one it is a life saver) and to make a long story short (ended up resetting it 3 times till I got an OS setup working right) I got it working fine now. Even got my HD audio output through the mDP working again. But my keyboard's still not working (and it's not the keyboard, it works on other's Surface and their working keyboard doesn't work on mine).

 

[xene97]

I am so relieved to see that I'm not the only one with this problem (but sorry for those who have also experienced it). I left my Surface on while eating dinner and when I came back I could no longer power it back on. I tried all the different key combinations and even held down the power button for 2 minutes - just in case... Nothing worked.

I took it in to the Microsoft Store the next morning and a funny thing happened. There was a gentleman who came in at the same time that I did with the same machine and the same exact problem. The technicians were unable to get the unit to properly boot so I left it with them to troubleshoot. Today I received a call to come and pick up my machine. They claimed that the problem was that the "hard drive" was bad and that was the reason why it wouldn't turn on. The explanation didn't make any sense to me since an internal drive shouldn't be needed to boot to BIOS (or UEFI or whatever it's called now) and why did someone else have the same exact problem at the same exact time as I did?

I balked at paying $450 for a replacement unit (I've had my Surface for 18 months now) and I guess my arguments were enough to sway them to replace my machine at no cost.

Fabulous customer service!!

 

[Eastlunder]

Yesterday evening I pushed power button on my SP3, screen powered on, I put in on the bed, when I turned arround and then back, screen was off. Since then I cannot power it on. Tried every possible combination of keys and buttons, nothing works, exactly the same situation as mentioned in first post

I still have warranty left, I will let you know what happens.

 

[Eastlunder]

I sent my device for repair/exchange 13.4., received it back today. It is working again
Acording to the document, that I received, they put the device to factory state and that after testing, no fault was discovered. I gues they somehow flashed it, it came back with windows 8.1 installed.