[SOLVED] How to troubleshoot 42min boot times

Scottes

Honorable
Jul 6, 2015
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My Windows 10 machine has been taking a very long time to boot for the last few months. I generally leave it up 24x7, but updates or some software installs require a reboot. The last time I had to reboot I noted the time I rebooted, went to bed and checked the event log the next morning - 42 minutes had elapsed between reboot and ready.

This started months ago, but that's only ~6 reboots. The first time it happened I did some troubleshooting and it appeared to have been caused by a Windows update, so I disabled it. The problem returned a couple reboots later, so now I have no idea.

I have no idea how to troubleshoot this issue, and nor any idea of how to provide more information. Any help would be appreciated.
 
Solution
given ?? is in front of the address for the drive, it must be an internal address the boot loader has for the hdd that its looking for, it sure beats putting the GPT number of the hdd in front of every line (every gpt drive on earth has its own code)

looks like it had fun with the gpu - BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \SystemRoot\System32\drivers\dxgkrnl.sys - many times, it must eventually load or screen wouldn't work.

makes me wonder if its the GPU. What model is it? could try running monitor off the motherboard and remove gpu just to test if it makes any difference.

could try booting off a UBuntu live USB and see if it makes any difference - https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/tutorial-create-a-usb-stick-on-windows - would tell us if...
6850K with 32GB RAM on Asus X99-Deluxe II mobo, just under 3 years old. BIOS has latest. One of the things I did was to update every driver I could think of. At one point I did unplug everything possible leaving just the Samsung M.2 boot driver, video card and keyboard. I did not remove half the RAM at a time though... I should have tried that. Along with a memtest I guess.

Once booted the system runs flawlessly, and I use this system 6-10 hours a day so I'd probably notice something - it just seems to be the boot times. Once running, things like temps and SMART are all fine.

And this was sudden - one day it booted fine, the next reboot took quite a while, like 15+ minutes from my poor memory. And since I usually only reboot for Windows updates, I blamed that, but now don't know. The recent 42 minutes was the only time I actually recorded it.
 
6850K with 32GB RAM on Asus X99-Deluxe II mobo, just under 3 years old. BIOS has latest. One of the things I did was to update every driver I could think of. At one point I did unplug everything possible leaving just the Samsung M.2 boot driver, video card and keyboard. I did not remove half the RAM at a time though... I should have tried that. Along with a memtest I guess.

Once booted the system runs flawlessly, and I use this system 6-10 hours a day so I'd probably notice something - it just seems to be the boot times. Once running, things like temps and SMART are all fine.

And this was sudden - one day it booted fine, the next reboot took quite a while, like 15+ minutes from my poor memory. And since I usually only reboot for Windows updates, I blamed that, but now don't know. The recent 42 minutes was the only time I actually recorded it.
How long does a "safe mode with networking" take ? What is your PC connected to? USB devices? Network (type of network)? etc..
 
I have not tried safe mode with networking, just safe mode with everything unplugged. It took a while. Many minutes, unsure of exact count, but 10-15? This included unplugging network and all USB device except the keyboard - I even unplugged the USB cables that go to the front of the case. Booting off a Windows recovery USB stick also took a while.

Thinking about this - unplugging everything possible - it does seem to narrow it down to CPU, mobo or RAM, doesn't it? Sure, it could be the video card...
 
Yes, I will try a memtest and pulling sticks when I get a chance.
Boot drive (NVME) is 65% full.
BIOS and Control Panel (System) report 32 GB. Is that a sufficient/accurate report for this? Could either be incorrect?
 
do you have any hard drives attached? apart from the nvme boot drive, any other storage?

Have you tried booting with just the nvme attached if you do have multiple drives?

I would run scans on the drives and check their health.
 
I enabled boot logging. I watched it for a bit. The BIOS logo appeared, along with the "Press F2 or Del to enter BIOS" message. That message went away after a few seconds and the BIOS logo remained. After 5 minutes I gave up and went to dinner. Checking the event logs, it took 21 minutes to boot this time.

@onespeedbiker: There's nothing obviously wrong in the boot log, though I don't know what "??" means:
e:\pktemp>grep "?" ntbtlog.txt
BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \??\C:\Program Files (x86)\Intel\Intel(R) Extreme Tuning Utility\Drivers\IocDriver\64bit\iocbios2.sys
BOOTLOG_LOADED \??\C:\Program Files\Logitech Gaming Software\Drivers\LgCoreTemp\lgcoretemp.sys
BOOTLOG_LOADED \??\C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\rzpnk.sys
BOOTLOG_LOADED \??\C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\rzpmgrk.sys
BOOTLOG_LOADED \??\C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\IOMap64.sys

e:\pktemp>grep -v BOOTLOG_LOADED ntbtlog.txt
Microsoft (R) Windows (R) Version 10.0 (Build 18363)
12 22 2019 17:59:31.500
BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \SystemRoot\System32\drivers\dxgkrnl.sys
BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \SystemRoot\System32\drivers\dxgkrnl.sys
BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \SystemRoot\System32\drivers\dxgkrnl.sys
BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \SystemRoot\System32\drivers\vmulti.sys
BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \SystemRoot\System32\drivers\dxgkrnl.sys
BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \SystemRoot\System32\drivers\dxgkrnl.sys
BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \??\C:\Program Files (x86)\Intel\Intel(R) Extreme Tuning Utility\Drivers\IocDriver\64bit\iocbios2.sys
BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\wd\WdFilter.sys
BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \SystemRoot\System32\DRIVERS\NDProxy.sys
BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \SystemRoot\System32\DRIVERS\NDProxy.sys
BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \SystemRoot\System32\DRIVERS\NDProxy.sys
BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \SystemRoot\System32\DRIVERS\NDProxy.sys


@Colif: I've unplugged everything except NVME, video and keyboard and it's still problematic.
 
given ?? is in front of the address for the drive, it must be an internal address the boot loader has for the hdd that its looking for, it sure beats putting the GPT number of the hdd in front of every line (every gpt drive on earth has its own code)

looks like it had fun with the gpu - BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED \SystemRoot\System32\drivers\dxgkrnl.sys - many times, it must eventually load or screen wouldn't work.

makes me wonder if its the GPU. What model is it? could try running monitor off the motherboard and remove gpu just to test if it makes any difference.

could try booting off a UBuntu live USB and see if it makes any difference - https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/tutorial-create-a-usb-stick-on-windows - would tell us if it is still windows or not.
 
Solution
It's an EVGA Nvidia 1080 Ti. I dont think the mobo has video and I'll have to get a different card from another PC, so I'll try the Ubuntu Live USB since I have one so that's easy for now. And it's a very good idea.
 
Hmm, I wasn't expecting an intel board without onboard graphics. Bad Asus, making it run quad SLI & Crossfire was probably good enough for them. It makes total sense from that point of view.

See if any of the others think of anything while i am not here later.

only other use of directx could be sound, do you have a sound card or use motherboard for that?
 
I just don't know about the mobo video. I previously didn't care since I always plan on having a discrete GPU for a desktop, so I never even looked. Checking it on Asus.com shows nothing about a GPU. It does have sound on the mobo and I do use that.
 
I just don't know about the mobo video. I previously didn't care since I always plan on having a discrete GPU for a desktop, so I never even looked. Checking it on Asus.com shows nothing about a GPU. It does have sound on the mobo and I do use that.

Sorry, I didn't mean to confuse, I had already looked at motherboard and knew you didn't have the option. I just didn't say it clearly :)
 
Why has nobody mentioned I/O to the boot drive? That would be the first place I'd look. If you have a disk activity light, you could look at that. Another thing to look at would be the cryptic system event log. To do that right-click the Start button and click Event Viewer. Then click the ">" to the left of Windows logs. That shows several logs, click on the SYSTEM one. In top part of that display scroll for entries flagged ERROR in red. Note that there's a lot of cryptic info there that probably means something only to some programmer, but just focus on the red ERROR entries to look for clues about what's slowing things down so much.
If Windows is doing a lot of recovery to marginal sectors, you could run CHKDSK from an administrative command prompt.
 
Chkdsk reports fine.
Windows event log does show errors about VMware Workstation shutting down unexpectedly, but that seems to happen during every shutdown. And a couple errors about failing to attach a volume, also during shutdowns.

And there's this, just one of them, and it might have been when I updated the drivers as it was just before a reboot.
The NVIDIA LocalSystem Container service terminated with the following error:
A generic command executable returned a result that indicates failure.

That's it for event log errors.