Windows 10: Exceptionally long boot times (8+ minutes) after installing Fall CU.

Hello'n'stuff! I've installed the Fall Creator's Update today! Yaaaay!.. ... Okay, no. It's a service pack that I forgot to defer for at least six months, so of course something goes wrong on at least one of my systems.

The system in question is a gaming laptop with an i7-6700k, 64 gigs of RAM, two Samsung 960 Pro SSDs in Raid0 (Yes, I have daily backups goin', don't worry), GTX 980 (Desktop GPU in a laptop form factor).. Point is, it's fast.

POSTing takes ages because it has to walk the memory, and obviously that takes a while with 64 gigs, but once it POSTs, pre-update, it took less than five seconds to boot. The Windows boot screens loaded so fast that they didn't even fade in before it flashed to the next phase.

Now, after POSTing, booting takes an average of eight minutes. Clearly something's up! It even does this in Safe Mode, so this very clearly related to the Fall CU that was installed right as this started happening.

Again, to be massively clear, this began happening after installing the Fall CU. I knew it was coming, so I made a point to do a fresh boot (no fastboot), do nothing but install the update, and reboot twice afterwards. Right from the first reboot (Even while the update was installing) it's always been taking this long.

ntbtlog doesn't report anything odd compared to another system that also got the Fall CU but has the same startup time as before.


Other odd things I've noticed:

Right after installing the Fall CU, it took *ages* for the computer to turn off. I figure this is due to Windows Update expecting me to leave the computer on for a few hours so it can slowly update remaining files rather than doing it all at once and eating up more of my time. The computer doesn't take long to turn off anymore, just on.

Enabling Fast Boot fixes the slow booting, but I had that turned off before because it was giving me some wicked issues and turning Fast Boot off fixed them. I don't know if that'll still be the case, but I still don't want to use it if it's possible to avoid it; I don't like the notion that I have a few gigabytes written to two SSDs in Raid0 every time I turn my computer off, and I run some fairly non-standard hardware considering its obvious financial cost, so I'd prefer to go through a full initialization at every boot instead of partially waking from hibernation.

After booting from Safe Mode back to normal mode, a browser window opened automatically and headed over to Microsoft's support page. Is this normal?


The Task Manager is acting really weird. If I go to the Startup tab, it claims the BIOS time is longer with each boot or reboot. Right now it's claiming it's over 4,000 seconds, and that definitely isn't accurate! It seems to go up by however long Windows takes to boot and then never resets its self. I feel like this might be related to the issue I'm experiencing, but I don't know where to begin tracking the specifics down. My normal gut instinct would be to look around in the BIOS, but Sager doesn't give its users much control in that regard. Aside from the usual overclocking stuff, I can adjust the date and time. That's basically it.

Secure Boot is disabled, for what it's worth. Trying to get Linux working with that on was a massive headache.



Anyway, that's what I've got now. Any help would be appreciated!

:)

 

Win10 1709 re-launches certain apps on boot

Windows 10 Fall CU after a cold SHUT_DOWN, Power off, Boot cycle, reopens 'certain' apps after login.

What is happening that is causing this, and how can it be totally prevented.

[Moved from: Windows / Windows 10 / Windows settings]

 

Possible transfer windows license to swapped hard drive with Windows on other machine?

Notice since Windows 8, it has worked exceptionally well. I would able to boot a Windows 8 installation originally from a Dell 8300 Dimension Intel P4 Netburst on a Asrock motherboard with a AMD Sempron. It just automatically reconfigured itself and worked.

 

Hi Nofew. Welcome to the TenForums @Nofew

Read your post and just want to confirm. You mention Fast Boot which to me is different than Windows Fast Startup. Are you meaning Windows Fast Startup and you've disable this?

Turn On or Off Fast Startup in Windows 10

The slow shutdown and power on boots make me think this is on, that is not disabled.


Ken

 

Thank you for the welcome!

I did mean to say Fast Startup throughout that post, my mistake.

 

Lets assume for minute that setting is not taking place, not sure why but let's assume.

If you go to command prompt(admin) or powershell(admin) and enter the following command to shutoff hibernation which will kill Fast Startup.

powercfg -h off

Test. To reverse swap off for on


Ken

 

As I stated in my first post, toggling the Fast Startup option in the GUI does have an affect; disabling it causes the system to take over eight minutes to boot, enabling it makes it take 10-15 seconds. However, as I'm on a SSD, I'm sure you can understand why I'd like to have the setting disabled, but also not take eight whole minutes to boot.

Again, to be clear, before the Fall CU, with Fast Startup disabled, I'd only take five seconds to boot.

 

Hmmm, my reading skills are slipping. Sorry.

Have you checked device manager for drivers not functioning or more importantly drivers that are MS defaults instead of Sager "Tweak" drivers.

I actually don't know they tweaked them but you mentioned a pretty locked down BIOS so I'm wondering.

 

'Tis okay! I'm already super-duper thankful that you're not giving me advice like "Did you try rebooting it?" or "Did you try disabling your AV?" and other stuff like that! (I've been on way too many forums where those kinds of suggestions seem to be the best solutions anyone can offer for any sort of problem. x.x... I mean, they help a lot of people, but when I post a question and ask for help, it's because I tried all the stuff like that and none of it worked.)

I haven't! Let's seeeeee.... Okay, all the devices appear fine. No mean-looking exclamations anywhere. I don't know what specific things are Sager-branded, though, or at least supposed to be. Ugh. Gah. Checking which ones are supposed to be is a crazy amount of trouble; they don't actually keep a sane list.

Do you know of any way to check how long each driver and service is taking to load? That'd probably be the best thing, but half of me figures you would've already said so if you had a tool for that.

 

Sorry I don't.

I seen some posters that have excellent knowledge on this topic. Hopefully they will be cruising through the threads.

What I would do is head to Sager site and see what drivers they have listed for your system. At least you could then do some cross checking.

If your machine was built for 10 then you could load these drivers. First I would shut off Windows Updating drivers. Windows key +R, sysdm.cpl, Hardware tab, Device Installation settings, No.

Then I would do one at a time and test. Should this be a driver issue and you find the trouble one then you will need to note it as the wrong driver will be loaded with the next major feature update 18xx.

I went the driver route after you pointed out that Fast Startup made it better and it does save some driver info. One member's opinion.

It is Friday night so you may want to wait for more members to jump in later tonight early tomorrow.

How long has it been since you loaded 1709. The clock is ticking on going back easy. Of course you could clean install 1703.


Ken

 

I installed it today, less than 24 hours ago. I have a full disk image with my previous install on it (though it's dated) and Backblaze's last backup was recent for the stuff that wasn't included in the image, so I can theoretically go back whenever, but I'd rather avoid having to go through all that trouble, obviously. Can't download the backup right now anyway; I'd go over my bandwidth limits.

Anyway, later I'll start going over the drivers for kicks. The annoying thing is that this didn't happen with the first CU earlier this year, but I managed to defer that for like six months and got the service pack with the fix-for-the-service-pack after it at the same time. I didn't know that that pack'd change my settings to not defer stuff, and I had this vague hope in Microsoft to not mess this one up. Sure learned my lesson. Again. <w<'

 

1) Perform an in place upgrade repair and see if the boot problem is fixed.
Repair Install Windows 10 with an In-place Upgrade Installation Upgrade Tutorials
2) If not download and install Windows performance recorder (WPR).
It may take a while but there are viewers that analyze the results.
3) Performance scenario: boot
4) Detail level: verbose
5) Logging mode: file
6) Launch administrative command prompt: wprui.exe
7) see the link for the profiles settings
Windows performance recorder - Microsoft Community


If you are not able to use the computer in safe mode with networking then switch to clean boot:
This is the administrative command prompt method:
(an additional user will be created too to see if there is any impact when you reboot)

8) msconfig (in the pop up system configuration > move the dot from normal startup to selective startup > uncheck load startup items > click service tab > in left lower corner check hide all Microsoft services > in the lower right side click disable all > click apply or ok > do not reboot)

9) taskmgr (in the pop up task manager > click on the start up tab > click on status so that the column sorts with enable rising to the top > right click on each row with enable and change to disable)

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...oot-in-windows
How to perform a Clean Boot in Windows 10 - TechNet Articles - United States (English) - TechNet Wiki

10) net user test /add

11) shutdown /r (you will reboot the computer so that it is in clean boot)

12) sign on with the new user named test > reboot > check performance

 

Maybe this is my mistake, but the tool you linked me to errors out. 0x80071069. There was more text, but I was dead tired and didn't think to write it down. Hopefully the error code is sufficient! Anyway, it doesn't write any output files after it gives me that, and it only pops that after it reboots my computer, waits the two minutes it says to wait, does some other tasks like it's working normally, and then finishes everything besides actually writing any files.

Was I supposed to run this in safe mode? If so I'll give that a shot; the issues persist while in safe mode. Adding a new user might be interesting, and I'll try it, but I don't think it'll affect my boot times; I'm at the spinner with Sager's logo rather than the "Welcome to Windows, you're now being logged in, preparing your desktop and stuff!" screen for the eight minutes. The actual login and everything else goes by as fast as it always has.

Right now I'll be a while before I can actually execute any steps; it just occurred to me that my laptop still operates and that means I can make a new backup, so I'm doing that now so if I can't fix things and have to roll back later, I don't have to panic about trying to make the backup right before the 30-day window expires.

 

There should be no errors download and installing or running WPR.

Check the version:
windows software development kit
10.0.14393.33

Select additional profiles for performance recording:
First level triage
CPU usage
Disk I/O activity
File I/O activity
Registry I/O activity
Heap usage
Pool usage
Virtual alloc usage


performance scenario: boot
Detail level: light
Logging mode: file
Number of iterations: 3

Once you click start for boot testing you should see:
WPR: boot trace in progress
Run 1 of 3
Gathering system information for on off boot
Restarting with rotating dots
computer icon
computer icon with rotating dots
splash screen
log on screen
WPR boot trace in progress
Run 2 of 3
etc.

on/off Boot Trace information was successfully saved
File name: C:\Users\[computer]\documents\WPR Files\Desktop....etc

open tracings: there should be 3 approximately 1 MB each

 

Errrr... Well. Okay. Yeah. The traces are about 1.4 gigs each. They compress very well with 7-zip and come down to about 100 megs each, but they're still too big to upload to the forum here directly. What should I do now?

Spoiler alert: I'm not an expert with this tool, but after glancing at the logs, I'm pretty sure the non-verbose logs won't help; there's a big gaping hole over everything where the system's getting stuck during boot except for the disk I/O, but the details there are very terse. I ran the tool again but only with the three I/O options enabled and this time set it to verbose, resulting in a log file that's about 2.8 gigs uncompressed (about 114 megs with 7-zip). Based on my whopping five minutes of experience, I've noticed that smss.exe is messing with the disk *solidly* the entire time things appear frozen, and that System(4) finds an End of File somewhere. These are the only two processes that seem to be doing literally anything at all during all this time. You can see screenshots over at Imgur: The most awesome images on the Internet . I don't know if this is enough information to help solve things, but I figure it's better to at least try to give'ya guys something​ and hope for the best rather than just start nagging you guys about where to upload 500 megs of data.

My first instinct was to check if my SSDs are failing, so I ran Intel Rapid Storage Technology's verification test. It passed. Pshew! I also ran chkdsk (three phases with the OS on, not the 5-phase one since I figure Intel's test covers phase 4 and 5), got no issues, and "sfc /scannow", which reported no errors. My next instinct is assuming a system file of some sort is missing or damaged, but I'm afraid to follow the instructions at Repair Install Windows 10 with an In-place Upgrade Installation Upgrade Tutorials for fear that it might make it impossible for me to do a rollback. Is that fear valid? Furthermore, is that diagnosis even valid since my system eventually does boot, rather consistently, after eight minutes, and "sfc /scannow" said I'm all good?



EDIT: Gah, figures, forgot to test with a new user. Oh well, I'm fairly sure that this is happening well before login anyway, given what I saw before WPRUI and what I'm seeing in the tool as well; that giant spike near the end is DWM and stuff coming up, which happens in a flash and is registered in the non-verbose logs on the CPU and such as well. I can still give making a second user account a try if'ya want, but right now I need to sleep and be up early tomorrow.. Er, today. Snap.

EDIT2: Forgot to mention, no errors this time! I wasn't sure what to check before so I checked basically every box. Evidently it didn't like that.