Surface Pro 2 - Surface cover telemetry driver / blank screen after putting tablet to sleep

had the same problem after October firmware update.  Tried several different methods and this is what worked for me FINALLY:

First, a caveat: Many have suggested going to device manager and rolling back the drivers to the old one (or uninstalling/deleting the driver and rescanning, which does the same thing).  Unfortunately, this only is temporary until you try to update again.

What worked:

(0) Go ahead and install all other Windows Update including the firmware update.  When you can't get past the "Please wait while we install a system update" screen, force restart (it was tricky for me but sometimes it was a combination of holding the power button down, using the volume up and/or down buttons).

(1) Go to Microsoft's official website and manually download the October 2013 Surface Pro Firmware Update.  Extract them from the ZIP archive to a folder of your choice.

(2) In device manager, rollback the drivers for anything showing the yellow triangle as not having installed correctly (for me, this was system aggregator and UEFI.  They will temporarily now show as not having any problem.

(3) Click update drivers, but DON'T let it search automatically.  Manually point it to the folder you extracted to.  Do this for both UEFI and System aggregator.

(4) Restart.

(5) It went through the update (let it finish...even though it looks like it stalled again, give it a few minutes--mine took only 5 minutes).

(6) It restarted and it looked like a few devices temporarily didn't work and the UEFI was still showing the yellow triangle.  After everything is loaded, restart it again.  It will go through another quick setup and then everything was fine and Windows Update shows "System Firmware update" as successfully installed now.

A combination of "advanced google use", luck, and trial and error finally worked.  There was a Russian page I had Google translate that helped somewhat including the methods on forums such as these.  The most helpful results were returned when searching for:

[surface pro 2 firmware "please wait while we install a system update"]

and expanding on some of the answers.microsoft.com results as well.

I hope this helps someone, good luck!!!

:)

Question:  I'm not doubting what you have written at all.  Just want to know in Step 0, when you can't get past the "Please wait while we install a system update", what are you doing to force this message?  I can produce this same messaging condition only if I try to do something during the update process... If I let it sit and run by itself, the drivers load, the messages do not occur...

Absolutely nothing.  The message appears by itself.  The gist of what I am reading tells me that basically, if you manually install the problem drivers (i.e., using the script referenced further in this thread or my roundabout method of installing the updates first, then "uninstalling" the problem drivers and then manually installing the drivers for those problem devices) you can avoid this problem.  If you haven't seen these messages at all, then consider yourself lucky.  A number of us have had these issues, but at least there seems to be an interim workaround and Microsoft seems to acknowledge the problem as they are working on it.

Thanks for the reply - 

I looked at the update history and it shows a firmware update on the same day I ran the powershell script.

Either way, I'm working.

thanks again!

Hello,

I was struggling with the same problem after October update for Surface Pro 2. Windows Update method worked fine only during first update - from that point everytime the same problem with unknown device.

I called support hotline - no progress.

I went to Microsoft Store - store employee spent 2 hrs - no progress here too.

Here is workaround for this problem which works everytime for me.

1. Restore you SP2 to factory state (you should see one device with exclamation mark - Surface Cover Telemetry).
2. DO NOT use Windows Update to update your device yet !!!
3.  Download drivers from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40856

4. Deploy drivers using script from here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/deploymentguys/archive/2013/05/16/deploying-drivers-and-firmware-to-surface-pro.aspx

5. Check if warning form Surface Cover Telemetry disappeared (should be gone).
6. Reboot device.
7. Update your SP2 using Windows Update.

There you go. No more problems with devices.

Hopefully MS will fix update process soon.

U said several times!  I had to reset my SP2 cuz it was doing wonky stuff but why have u done this several times?

I was playing with W8.1 - if something went wrong - factory reset :)

Interestingly I just swapped up my SP2 128 to an SP2 256 (wanted the extra memory) and before updating anything I saw the recent fix posted about the manual driver update.

When I looked at the update history, no firmware update was applied, and I had no unknown devices. I ran the manual driver package via powershell script, rebooted, and ran windows update and it said no update found.

I wonder if MS pulled the firmware update entirely?

Or perhaps it is only available for specific models? I know when I had the 128Gb model it showed the firmware update.

Anyone have any ideas?

Either way, mine is working perfectly.

Hello,

If you applied firmware package using drivers package and powershell script, so MS Update detected it as installed.

I you updated your SP2 first time - problem with unknown devices is not existent. This is happening only after second and next updates.

I assume that October drivers were meant to work only with October firmware update. If you already installed October firmware and then restored to factory image - it seems like FW is NOT downgradable - so drivers in factory image are not compatible anymore (WiFi adapter and SCT drivers).