Hello - We recently purchased several TB310G2 adapters to use with our Dell Workstations.
The adapter works great but we just realized that these adapters will not go back online after rebooting until someone signs in.
Most of these workstations are going to be used remotely, so no one will be physically sitting in front of them.
When rebooting any of these computers and sitting back on the Windows log in screen, the adapters will be completely offline. Can’t ping them, can’t RDP to them, nothing.
As soon as you log in back to Windows, connectivity is reestablished.
Is there any setting or way to make them stay “Awake” after rebooting and stay online without having to log back in?
This is preventing people who are doing RDP to them from working as they basically can’t log back in remotely after a reboot happens.
I’ve tried looking in BIOS but couldn’t find any power / TB related setting. Same with Windows, the adapter has no power management option.
Most commonly, this would be caused by certain Thunderbolt settings within the BIOS for the computer. I know you mentioned having looked there already, but you may even want to reach out to Dell for assistance in locating if/where these settings may be. Also the way these settings are named can be slightly different depending on the specific computer model and BIOS version.
Some BIOS settings I would recommend looking for would be, or may have similar wording as:
-USB/Thunderbolt Configuration
-Enable External USB port
-Enable USB Boot Support
-Enable Thunderbolt Technology support
-Enable Thunderbolt Boot Support
-Enable Thunderbolt (and PCIe behind TBT) Pre-Boot Modules
Hopefully this helps allowing the TB310G2 to be active before having a user log into the system!
Hello Adam - Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, none of these settings worked.
I went thru every single BIOS screen and double checked everything just in case I missed any of the options you previously mentioned but unfortunately, I had already turned all of them on.
Do you know if any group policies, Windows settings or Windows services that could be affecting this somehow?
At this point, we can replicate the behavior with 10 of these TB310G2 adapters we bought. If the computer reboots, they won’t come back online until you manually sign in. You can ping the machine and as soon as it reboots, it just goes offline and never comes back online.
You can actually see the network adapter showing the globe icon (not connected) briefly as soon as you log in and then within seconds the network connection is reestablished.
Another thing that could contribute to this could be DMA (Direct Memory Access) protection. You may want to disable this in Windows 11 to see if that allows the TB310G2 to work prior to logging in.
This can depend on the Thunderbolt settings available in the BIOS which is why I suggested checking those first. Were you able to test disabling DMA protection to see if that allowed the TB310G2 adapter to function prior to login?
You may also want to reach out to Dell directly to see if they are aware of any Dell specific settings that could prevent Thunderbolt peripherals from working prior to a user logging in.