Surface Laptop 1 keyboard and touchpad stopped working

Anonymous
2019-03-27T13:15:20+00:00

About a week ago following a Windows update my keyboard and touchpad on the first gen Surface Laptop stopped working. Initially the 'surface hid mini driver' appeared to have failed and displayed "status_device_power_failure"

When I rolled back the update and uninstalled the 'surface hid mini driver' and restarted the keyboard started working again. However when new updates installed the same issue started again. Now when I rollback the updates and fix the 'surface hid mini driver' the keyboard still doesn't work.

At this point I have reinstalled all the updates, and the 'surface hid mini driver' seems to be stable and working properly but the keyboard still doesn't work.

Any advice?

Surface | Surface Laptop | Install and update

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-02-01T16:23:54+00:00

    Had same problem.  Went through all the steps recommended, but no help.  When I attempted to reinstall Windows from a USB it failed because I had Bitlocker on.  When I went back in to disable Bitlocker, magically the keyboard and trackpad worked again.

    I'm willing to bet that attempting to reinstall Windows had the same effect as disconnecting from power and holding the power button for 30 seconds.

    Whatever this driver does, I'm betting it can only be reset after the device is completely powerless.  Who knows.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-01-30T10:37:38+00:00

    I was able to fix the issue on my laptop (Surface Laptop Gen1). Here are the steps I took:

    1. Windows reset ---> Didn't work
    2. Uninstalled the surface hid minidriver that was showing an error (code 10), then restart ---> Didn't work
    3. Reinstall Surface drivers/firmware manually ---> Didn't work
    4. Rolled-back the latest windows feature update ---> Didn't work
    5. Disconnect power source and hold power button for 30 seconds (it will force a restart and disconnect the battery for a short second) ---> It worked

    Please let me know if this works for anyone else.

    This worked, thank you very much!

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-01-03T20:59:27+00:00

    Worked perfectly. I did the other things you mentioned before trying #5! :)

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-12-10T14:03:38+00:00

    Disabling and re-enabling the hid mini driver dors not work for me. On one occasion, uninstalling the keyboard drivers and restarting worked, but that didnt work the next time.  The latest time, rebooting via the power button worked 

    It seems there are multiple paths to this problem and not a single solution.

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  5. Anonymous
    2019-12-10T02:52:40+00:00

    I hope this helps someone as it worked for me.  When this occurs, the only trackpad works, the touch screen works, but only the power button and Fn buttons work on the keyboard.  When I go into Device Manager, the Surface Hid Mini Driver has a yellow triangle over the icon.

    To fix the issue, I simply right-click, click "Disable", then accept whatever warning it gives me about the device stopping (DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK, it didn't cause any issues for me).  Then, right-click again, click "Enable".  And BOOM, the keyboard works again without even restarting the machine.

    This has happened twice in the last 6 months and makes no sense.  I'm mostly posting this so that I'll have the note for myself in the future when it happens again.  I hope this is able to help someone else.  Extremely infuriating that Microsoft hasn't been able to give the rest of you a reasonable solution.

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