Hi all, so this issue cropped up yesterday, where the network adapter (Marvell AVASTAR) just disappeared from my device list. I know SP3s have a lot of issues with adapters, but I can't seem to find anything quite for this.

I've tried rebooting, refreshing, and factory resetting everything. It seems to be a driver/detection problem - there's no adapter listed in the device manager, though there is an entry for an 'Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed).' I've tried uninstalling that, uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers, adding the adapter as legacy hardware, and switching up that order. One time it was detected and working, but it stopped when I rebooted. With the adapter added through the Add Hardware wizard, I'm able to see the proper entry in the device manager and the Unknown USB Device entry is gone (usually, it still shows up sometimes). It still has that yellow exclamation mark with it, giving a Code 31 error (Windows can't load the drivers required for this device).

Also, I'm not totally sure I'm attempting to install the drivers properly. I'm using the downloads from the microsoft website (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38826), but I'm still second-guessing what I'm doing. Because the Windows version is 8.1, I figured I should install the Surface Platform Installer (SurfacePro3_Win8x_151026_0.msi) but when I go to use the device driver installer, it just says it wasn't able to find drivers for my machine. I also have the Win8.1 msu file but that just says the update is already installed.

I know there've been widespread Surface Pro 3 issues with the adapter dropping after sleep or after an update to Windows 10, and I had experienced those problems before, but this just sort of happened out of the blue and isn't fixable through just a reboot. If anyone can provide some guidance here, I'd really, really appreciate it.

Yesterday, between one minute and the next, the network adapter went missing from the device manager. It has shown up randomly again and vanished within 10-15 minutes. Currently it has been missing from the list for around 12-14 hours. I have turned on 'Show hidden devices' and it doesn't show up there either. I've downloaded the latest driver package from the Microsoft website and tried to manually install the drivers. The device is fully updated with all the latest updates. I plugged it in to a wired network and checked and it says the device is fully up to date.

This is what my device manager looks like for network adapters.

The following occurs when I try to install the drivers from the downloaded Surface Pro 3 driver zip package.

As you can see, despite picking the correct driver it doesn't actually show a device to install. I'm not sure if this is related to the fact that it is missing from device manager completely or not.

I've done a fully RESET on the device twice to no change at all. The screenshots above were taken directly after a full Windows 10 RESET.

I've also searched all the various posts to try and resolve it and nothing seems to line up. As shown above, I can't actually update my drivers as it won't let me pick anything.