Question Windows 10 Long Boot Time (20 minutes) Black Screen With Spinning Circle

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hamster22

Feb 14, 2019
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Since a week ago after a Windows Update my boot time increased to 20 minutes, it stalls at a black screen with a spinning circle and then eventually gets to the login screen.

When I do log in Windows Firewall is off by default, start menu is laggy, I cannot type in Cortana, and my network is not functioning fully.

I've tried taking out the graphics card and hard drives and it doesn't have any effect, it's definitely a Windows/software problem, probably conflicting with a driver. In my latest effort I did a clean Windows 10 install, rushed to disable Windows Update, and it worked for a day but after a restart the issue popped up again. I can't find clear information if this is a recent issue with Windows Update, I don't see many posts specifically having my issues.

Specs:

i5 6600k
32GB Ram
240GB SSD
Geforce 1070
Windows 10 Pro Version 1809

*edit I created a second user, and the issues are the same across the board, can't type in Cortana, long load times for the login screen etc. Strange behavior overall.

*edit 2: scroll down to post #20 it might be the best solution.
 
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I have the exact same issue. It started after installing Windows 10 pro on a new SSD (Crucial 1TB). I've reinstalled and repaired windows a few times but the problem comes back after a few hours to a few days.

From what I can tell the Task Scheduler fails to automatically start with windows and this causes a cascade of errors and failures. TS is set to 'automatic' start up but it doesn't boot and I have to trigger it manually once I'm able to get to my desktop.

Checking the Event Viewer I consistently get this error first:
The Network Store Interface Service service did not respond on starting.

Although I tried disabling NSI through services but that didn't help, so it could just be a symptom of the problem rather than the cause..

Errors appear but windows then takes another 15-20 minutes to get to the login screen - by that I mean I'll restart the computer at 12:00, the errors will start appearing in the logs at 12:05 but I will not see the login screen until 12:30.

Checked Device Manager for faulty hardware, everything says it's working fine. Scans of my SSD say it's working fine. The only problem with the drive might be that none of my partitions are set to 'Active' but it booted up fine the first few times and degraded over a few days.

Any help would be appreciated.
 
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I still get the issue but only upon restart or if I shut down the PC and start it again in quick succession. If I shut down overnight and start in the morning it will boot fine.

One of the things that has helped me get my PC to behave normally is uninstall and reinstall the graphics driver. W10 automatically downloads drivers and replaces existing ones so I would let it reinstall the graphics driver on its own and straight away I could type in the search bar etc. Booting and being stuck on the blackscreen with the spinning circle is still an issue though.
 
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hamster22 said:
I still get the issue but only upon restart or if I shut down the PC and start it again in quick succession. If I shut down overnight and start in the morning it will boot fine.

One of the things that has helped me get my PC to behave normally is uninstall and reinstall the graphics driver. W10 automatically downloads drivers and replaces existing ones so I would let it reinstall the graphics driver on its own and straight away I could type in the search bar etc. Booting and being stuck on the blackscreen with the spinning circle is still an issue though.
Click to expand...

You ever Find a solution for this?
We currently have 2 departments that are being hit with the exact same issue you described.
we keep having to reimage the machine and that only lasts a day or so and the issue returns.
Anyone have any Ideas?
 
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No luck for me, I still have the issue and no idea what causes it. I've tried all sorts but if I restart the PC I still get the 20 minute black screen before being able to log in, it's actually increased now to 50 minutes. It doesn't matter if Windows Update is disabled or not. And like clockwork the issue comes back a day or two again. My only theory is a recent version of Windows 10 doesn't agree with a particular piece of hardware of configuration.
 
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Yeah its possible the only issue i have with that is we have other machines with the same Model laptop and its not happening to them. So I'm not sure whats going on. I've been through the event viewer so many times.
Seems to me when i click shutdown it comes up just fine. but when i Click restart that's when things go down hill... I don't know what to do. Just frustrating
 
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Can you find the windows patch that reloads the wrong driver and remove it from the list, you should be able to block it from being installed again.
Those auto driver updaters are real bad about that.
 
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btroyer2011 said:
Yeah its possible the only issue i have with that is we have other machines with the same Model laptop and its not happening to them. So I'm not sure whats going on. I've been through the event viewer so many times.
Seems to me when i click shutdown it comes up just fine. but when i Click restart that's when things go down hill... I don't know what to do. Just frustrating
Click to expand...

That rules out the hardware issue then. I've tried a fresh Windows install and them immediately disabling the auto driver update but the issue came back within a day.
 
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I have the same problem only its after a long period of time of the system being off. It has to be OS related. When I power on the computer for the first time each day it takes longer than it used to. I either get a black screen or the boot process is stuck at the Windows Loading screen for an extended period of time.

I'm going to try disabling all non Microsoft Services to see if the issue replicates. If it does, i'll re-enable them one by one to try and narrow down the service. Hopefully it's not microsoft related but it might be as I suspect this issue came through as a windows update.
 
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It only started happening to me after a windows update although I'm unsure which one since I hadn't updated for a long period of time. I've tried doing clean installs and resets but the issue comes back after a day like clockwork. Driving me nuts. Everything boots ok if I shut down the PC and leave it off overnight, but if I shut down and turned the PC back on within a few minutes the issue comes back. Why it would care about the duration is beyond me.
 
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Hi all,

A few questions:

Is everyone having the issue on Windows 10 1809?
Do you happen to see the NSI service hanging at boot with a 7022 error code, and if so, are other underlying services failing?
What vendor/model of computers is everyone using? Or are these all custom built?

I have many machines being hit by this.

Thank you!
 
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jwkuipers said:
Hi all,

A few questions:

Is everyone having the issue on Windows 10 1809?
Do you happen to see the NSI service hanging at boot with a 7022 error code, and if so, are other underlying services failing?
What vendor/model of computers is everyone using? Or are these all custom built?

I have many machines being hit by this.

Thank you!
Click to expand...
None of my machines that are on 1809 are having issues.
Even the one that was updated when it first came out, before it was pulled from distribution.
 
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While I'm unsure why there is such a long boot, there are two points that stuck out. First, "The only problem with the drive might be that none of my partitions are set to 'Active' but it booted up fine the first few times and degraded over a few days." Unless the drive is formatted with GPT, a it needs to have an active partition to boot,so it sounds like a corrupted MBR. You first (again if the drive is not formatted GPT) might want to make the Disk 0 or System Partition (usually about 25gb) active (right click menu) in the Disk Manager. If you get a MBR error, than it is probably a corrupted MBR.

1. Boot into System Recovery Options. Launch “Command prompt”, then type the command bootrec.exe and “Enter” to see the options that are available for this tool. (There are four parameter available : /FixMbr, /FixBoot, /ScanOs and /RebuildBcd. Each of them can help you solve different boot problems.)

2. Execute /FixMbr in Windows 10 with Command Prompt. (/FixMbr allows the repair of a corrupter or damaged Master Boot Record. And you should use it when you meet one of these error messages: “Operating System not found", “Error loading operating system", “Missing operating system" or “Invalid partition table".)

The other observation was "Reboot" had a long boot, while after a standard shutdown, the computer boots up quickly. This is because of the Fast Startup utility. With Fast Startup enabled (default), with a standard shutdown the system files are loaded into memory and the computer goes into a form of pseudo hibernation. Then, the next time you boot up, the systems files are already loaded into memory, so the computer will boot up in seconds. However , this does not occur with a restart, which shutsdown without Fast Startup, so the systems files are written to the boot drive and the RAM is cleared of data. So what ever is causing the excessive long boots involves the loading of the systems files into memory (ie a corrupted boot process)
 
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Interesting, thanks for the response Kevin.

Copying that post in here for future reference:

snavE_nosaM

48 points·3 days ago
Go to C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService, I'm willing to bet NTUSER.DAT in that location is much larger than it should be, and growing. This file should really only be 256KB. If this is the case you have two options:

Option 1
  1. Boot into a Windows 10 ISO and instead of installing Windows 10, select the option to repair the machine. Go into command prompt in the repair option and rename that LocalService folder to LocalService.old
    1. C:
    2. cd \Windows\ServiceProfiles
    3. rename localservice localservice.old
  2. Reboot the computer
  3. Go to C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService and confirm that the file size is now smaller (on some of our machines it didn't go all the way to 256KB, sometimes it only went to 768KB
Option 2
  1. In the registry, go to HKey_Users\S-1-5-19\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\AppContainer\Mappings
    1. When you click Mappings, it could take a couple minutes to load because it is loading up a bunch "folders"
    2. On startup, the system has to address all of these files in this location, so the more files in here, the longer the boot
  2. Delete the Mappings hive, and recreate Mappings
  3. Reboot

If your issue is related to NTUSER.DAT being larger than normal, either of these will fix the issue. It is worth noting that these steps didn't work on a PC we have that was installed in Legacy mode (not sure if I didn't do it correctly or if it just doesn't work for Legacy boot machines). We are choosing to do Option 1 on our machines because this leaves us with the larger NTUSER.DAT file to play with and see if we can figure out what is causing it (who am I kidding, we probably won't be able to figure it out). Also worth noting that this is not a permanent fix, and the NTUSER.DAT file does very slowly grow again (in our scenario it would take a year to make an impact again on boot times).

Hopefully our hours and hours of troubleshooting and support calls can help save someone from going through the mental agony that we did.
Click to expand...
 
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I did a RAM test with Memtest86 last night and it found a ton of errors with my RAM. I'm going to repeat the test with the RAM in different DIMMs to confirm if the problem is with the memory or the motherboard. It could be that faulty RAM is triggering this problem with windows, at least for my machine. Recommend others in this thread test their RAM also, just to rule it out as a cause.

https://www.memtest86.com

And here's a tutorial on using the software:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_xFNojChNA


EDIT: just checked out the reddit link, thanks for posting that, it looks promising.
 
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deleting and recreating the 'Mappings' folder in the registry (As described in the Reddit link) fixed the problem for me. It didn't make my NTUSER.DAT file smaller but windows boots up straight away anyhow. Thanks for whoever found that solution, this was driving me nuts.
 
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