[SOLVED] PC takes extremely long on each section of the boot sequence

[IanMacDonald]

System Specs:
CPU - Ryzen 9 3900x
MB - ASUS PRIME X570-P
GPU - ZOTAC GTX970 Reference Card
RAM - Corsair Vengeance RGB x2 16GB Modules, 3200MHz (system defaults them to roughly 2333MHz)
PSU - Corsair VX550W

Drives:
Team Group 240GB SATA SSD ( I don't remember the exact model)
SAMSUNG 180GB SATA SSD (I don't remember the exact model either but it's fairly old)
Seagate 2TB FireCuda SSHD Hybrid
A very old 1TB Hitachi that came from a prebuilt HP system in 2010-2011
Sabrent 500GB Rocket PCIe 4.0 M.2

This is a new install of windows on a new PCIe 4.0 M.2 I purchased a few days ago. Every drive was formatted when I reinstalled.
The problem is that the system takes about 30-40 mins to boot. Each sequence is carried out; the black screen that normally appears shortly before the motherboard logo, then the option to enter bios, then the motherboard logo with the Windows dots circling underneath and eventually the Windows log in screen. Each of these bits takes agonisingly long.
I have a fresh install of windows on a new Sabrent PCIe 4.0 M.2. By fresh I mean that I installed it the day before writing this. Before that reinstall I had it installed on the SATA 240GB Team Group SSD.
After the reinstall yesterday I noticed that windows was asking me to choose which volume I wanted to boot from before windows was reached during the boot sequence. I solved it when I discovered that despite formatting the drive, windows thought that was still a copy of windows to still be booted from on it. Since then the extremely long boot time problem started.

UPDATE: I eventually got to the American Megatrends screen where I pressed F1 to get to the BIOS setup. I found out that it was trying to boot off of either the TeamGroup SATA SSD that used to have windows on it before I formatted it, or an external hardrive that I used to reinstall windows. It doesn't allow me to choose any other drive from those two. After leaving the system for half an hour, it reached windows, everything within Windows works.

This is my first time asking a question here so sorry if my explanation reads badly. If any more information is needed then please let me know, I will be happy to give any more details.

 

[Flayed]

Do a fresh install on the m2 drive with all other drives not connected to the pc. Once Windows is installed connect all your other drives

 

[IanMacDonald]

Do a fresh install on the m2 drive with all other drives not connected to the pc. Once Windows is installed connect all your other drives

Thanks! I'll give that a go tonight and report back to see what happens.

 

[IanMacDonald]

Do a fresh install on the m2 drive with all other drives not connected to the pc. Once Windows is installed connect all your other drives

It's all fixed!

I reinstalled Windows on the M.2 with all drives disconnected. During the install, the setup complained that it could not install it on the M.2 because it could not find a partition. After some Googling I eventually fixed it, but during that fix I had to change the disk to an MBR disk. I presume that was what was preventing windows from finding a suitable partition. However, I can't fathom why that was an issue when windows was installed on it a couple days prior.

All was well for the day, I rebooted it multiple times when installing drivers and the system got up and running as fast as you could expect it to for a PCIe 4.0.
But the problem came back last night when it would sit on a black screen before reaching the motherboard logo. I was unwilling to wait to see if it was the exact same issue as before, so I wont know for sure if it came back or not. But I managed to fix it by simply unplugging the external USB drive I had left plugged in from when I was booting off of it for the Windows setup. So the problem may have been caused by the system trying to boot off of the USB. It was this that reminded me of another symptom that I forgot to mention as part of the inital problem; the M.2 never showed up in the BIOS as a bootable drive, only being mentioned as an NVMe disk. The external USB drive was listed as a bootable disk. Of course, the system still booted eventually from the M.2, but I presume that the BIOS not seeing it as a bootable disk probably had something to do with the age long boot times.

The M.2 is now clearly shown in the BIOS boot list, possibly by it now being an MBR disk, and all works as well as I had hoped.
Thank you!