Question Windows hangs for 30 mins on the loading screen when I restart, but not when I shut down and turn it back on ?

[Dimitri001]

This has been going on for years and I've never addressed it, because I rarely restart the computer, but recently it started becoming a problem.

If I shut my computer down and then turn it on, everything happens normally, but if I restart the computer or if I do an update and then shut it down, it will hang on the loading screen for like 30 minutes before eventually booting into windows. By the loading screen I mean the black screen with the blue windows logo in the middle and the little loading circle spinning underneath it.

Sometimes when it's stuck at this screen I'll hear the HDD working and working and working really hard, while at other times, there's absolutely no sound from the HDD, as if it's just hanging for no reason. The red LED light that indicates activity on the case is off.

Any idea what could be causing this? I'm running Windows 10 and, as I say, this has been going on for years, so it's kept up over many many updates.

 

[lantis3]

Possibilities:

1. Hard drive might be dying.
2. PC might try to boot from USB drive, if there is any.
3. HDD is too slow (if that WD 640GB is the system disk) and Windows Update takes a lot of time to update tons of small files when you reboot. Time to replace it with SSD. Or get a new mini pc for less than $200.

Check Event Viewer.

Also post a picture of Disk Management to imgur.com
https://www.lifewire.com/disk-management-2625863

 

[Bob.B]

This has been going on for years and I've never addressed it, because I rarely restart the computer, but recently it started becoming a problem.

If I shut my computer down and then turn it on, everything happens normally, but if I restart the computer or if I do an update and then shut it down, it will hang on the loading screen for like 30 minutes before eventually booting into windows. By the loading screen I mean the black screen with the blue windows logo in the middle and the little loading circle spinning underneath it.

Sometimes when it's stuck at this screen I'll hear the HDD working and working and working really hard, while at other times, there's absolutely no sound from the HDD, as if it's just hanging for no reason. The red LED light that indicates activity on the case is off.

Any idea what could be causing this? I'm running Windows 10 and, as I say, this has been going on for years, so it's kept up over many many updates.

Post a screenshot from crystal disk info.

 

[Dimitri001]

Possibilities:

1. Hard drive might be dying.
2. PC might try to boot from USB drive, if there is any.
3. HDD is too slow (if that WD 640GB is the system disk) and Windows Update takes a lot of time to update tons of small files when you reboot. Time to replace it with SSD. Or get a new mini pc for less than $200.

Check Event Viewer.

Also post a picture of Disk Management to imgur.com
https://www.lifewire.com/disk-management-2625863

Ok, I checked Event Viewer and it's logged a ton of errors since this started, but it seemed to have logged many errors on days when Windows was starting fine.

It's not a daying HDD, because this has been happening for years. It's also not a slow HDD as it starts normally when I shut down, there's no way there's this much of a difference between a restart and a boot from shut down.

I'll try to look at the other stuff later.

 

[johnbl]

-google how to enable windows verbose startup logging and make the registry changes so windows will tell you what is going on.

-on a power cycle windows will mark the drives file system as dirty. this will force the system to run a chkdsk on the drives and it can take a long time. More time if there are errors. often these can be avoided by turning off lazy writes on the drive (this will force windows to flush the drive data buffers to disk and can reduce corruption of the file system.

crystaldiskinfo.exe or other tools can read the smart data from the drives and tell you if the drive is failing. You can also read the firmware version and then check for firmware updates.

- I have seen issues where people have set roaming profiles to network drives but included temp directories to the profile. this can force windows to reinstall all of the temp files. Check your roaming profile size and make sure it is small. Clear internet cache/temp files and make sure they are not in the roaming profile.

note: you might turn off sleep functions, this will allow windows to complete drive integrity tests/repairs on mechanical drives.
normally these functions start to run 5 minutes after the system goes idle and run until the system sleeps. with large drives the process can be starved and not complete.

for electronic drives you can boot into bios and leave the drive in the bios screen for a few hours and the drive firmware will do repairs without having windows providing drive use contention.

 

[johnbl]

you might also turn off windows virtual memory, reboot and turn it back on. this will remove your pagefile.sys and create another one. helps when your pagefile is on a failing spot on your drive. This is one of the things that windows idle time repair process would attempt to repair if it completes. (ie mark windows will attempt to read failing clusters over and over until it gets a good copy, then it will move the data and mark the failing cluster as bad, it takes a long time when the drive has errors)

 

[onespeedbiker]

FYI,, during a normal start, Windows usually just loads an image of it's prevr condition when you shut down. During a Restart Windows starts from scratch and sequentially loads the OS drivers. The usual suspect in long Restarts is Windows trying to load a driver(s) that it can't find, is corrupted or fails for some other reason, but it may try many times to do so holding up the boot time. Best strategy is see which driver is holding things up and remove the driver, if everything else is working.