Windows 10 Pro slow boot with peripherals attached

DocPit

Distinguished
Oct 23, 2009
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I’m running a Dell M7710 with Windows 10 Pro. I have an external monitor (D2713H), a Wacom Cintiq, and several external drives connected. In the last several weeks, I’ve had a booting problem: If I disconnect all peripherals, the computer will boot in a reasonable time. However, if I do not disconnect all peripherals, Windows will bring up the Dell logo, but it will take a L-O-N-G time (>5 min, I’m not sure how long because I leave to get something else done) before the small circle of dots comes up and then the login screen.

In one of the Windows forums, someone suggested bringing-up Disk Management to make sure the external drives are not marked as Active. When I tried to access Disk Management it took 8 minutes to load the disk configuration information. Virtual Disk Manager then found an unknown Disk 2 that needs to be initialized. If I try to initialize it, I get a Device not Ready message, which makes sense because, as far as I can see, there is no device.

C: = Disk 0, D: = Disk 1; Disk 2 = unknown/not initialized; J: = Disk 3; E: = Disk 4; I: = Disk 5; K: = CD-ROM 0

Any advice as to how I might proceed?
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
looks like you need to replace disc 2 then, since slow boots means PC is waiting for hardware to respond, sure sign some hardware isn't working or you need new drivers.

I assume its one of your external drives, as if it goes into that state its not normally just a partition on a drive, but the entire drive

Shame you didn't take screen shot of disk management and drive sizes should tell you which it is. Another way is look in the bios.