Slow boot; does one loading screen, then a second.

[poochiepiano]

So from my searches, it seems like slow booting is a very common problem and a plethora of "solutions" though many tend to only be temporary.

Booting with Windows 7 took a few seconds max. Recently, with Windows 10, my boot process goes to the typical black screen with the blue windows logo and the rotating dots at the bottom. This lasts for a few seconds; what I normally expect the boot to take. But then immediately after, I get a black screen with the same rotating dots, but at a notably lower resolution. This takes an incredibly long time, like in the range of 10 minutes or so, before proceeding. Nothing abnormal is apparent afterwards; my computer behaves just fine. Does anyone know what it's doing at this point? Why does it take so long? How can I check for possible causes?

I'm running on an i5-6500k, Asrock z97 Extreme6, EVGA GTX 960 SSC, Samsung 850 Evo (boot disk) and a WD Blue 1TB, 8 GB G.skill Ripjaws.

Thanks, and let me know if you need any other information.

 

[RaDiKaL_]

A slow boot is 99% of the times the HDD/SSD, obviously 10min in an SSD is a big red flag, but it could be a software (windows) issue as well.

Check your SSD status with Crystal Disk Mark, lets make sure your SSD is working as intended.

On the software side I'd start trying a restore point or even better a fresh Windows install, but if you wanna leave that for last you could run a sfc /scannow from cmd dialog with admin privileges, lets see if there's some error/corrupt file in windows installation.