Slow boot up

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I have a 4 year old MSI Z370 MS-7B61 mother board.  To date no problems.

Recently I had a BSOD and all locked up and sorted by my local computer shop but upon return it wanted an external drive to boot.  Clearly the shop had not rest it to the internal drive.  To their credit they sent an engineer to me and after some high speed activity in the BIOS it seemed sorted BUT I now find it takes over a minute and a half to boot – used to be a few seconds.  Looks as though it is checking loads of possible boot devises and getting to the right one last – so into the motherboard setting myself to check the settings and made sure the boot priority is the SSD with Windows Boot Manager first.  Seemed to fix it but now I note that if I power off and on just using the PC front panel power button boot time is 8 sec but if I turn off the mains to the PC it takes 1 min 18 seconds. My computer shop says don’t turn the mains off!!  Not very helpful.  Any ideas?  Copy of bot options attached.

TIA

Peter

 

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Unfortunately we have the “after” picture, but no idea what it was “before”.

The shot you supplied shows the BIOS is fairly standard in configuration and is expecting a UEFI boot, which implies you shoula have a GPT partition table.

Perhaps the most basic test would be to type the text below into a command prompt:

wmic diskdrive list status

generically a UEFI layout will have 3 or more partitions, and if the “status” reported isn’t “OK” you need to be questioning how that was missed previously. If you have somehow upgraded from Windows 7 and there are two partitions (ie, the MSR partition is absent) then the machine may indeed attempt to UEFI boot the hard disk before engaging CSM and booting a legacy MBR booting media as that is what the settings shown instruct..

The computer shop are actually right about the power – Windows no longer shuts down to completely dead unless you tell it to if running with a modern BIOS is configured in its default state. It recovers from a stored state loaded straight from the drive (or even still in memory) when the inactive hardware powers up again. If you pull the plug or force a real shutdown (eg shutdown -s -t 01 in command prompt) Windows has to start by loading all the components to recreate that state from the drive individually which means a lot more shuffling around the media gathering and discarding components as required.. and a slightly longer start up time.

Seems you have an option on C-state on or off (that’s the “suspend in memory” power saving option – usually signified by a change in the power LED colour or flashing)  (https://download.msi.com/archive/mnu_exe/M7B61v1.0_EURO.zip) so if it was enabled the power button settings the machine had prior to whatever happened would have determined if that was used.

Then again not knowing what happened previously it could be the memory training (default at every boot) is slowing things if the module configurations have changed – the timing might be out with mixed modules..

Unfortunately without more detail as to the system configuration now it’s hard to recommend what the problem might be with certainty. The fact you haven’t mentioned Windows taking any diagnostic action indicates the problem is more likely configuration than an actual fault.. Most systems blue screen at some point.. it’s not always an actual problem and the “switch it off and on again”, whilst much maligned, is sometimes all that’s needed to get Windows to get its act together..

I guess the bullet solution would be to note all the BIOS settings manually, then default them and configure from there, but it’s going to be a problem getting help if that fails and it’s your only machine..

Finally <b>check if bitlocker is enabled, and if it is write down the recovery code and check it works by entering the recovery options, before changing anything. </b>If you haven’t got that code you could loose everything if bitlocker is enforced..

(recovery options – usually holding the left shift key on the keyboard when clicking the shut down on the power menu should do it.. you’ll need to enter the key to get the command prompt from there, for example..)

 

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peterjv wrote:

power off and on just using the PC front panel power button boot time is 8 sec

Instead of shutting down your PC is going to sleep – Windows is paused and goes into a low power state.

You can control this from the Power Settings
Settings > System > Power and sleep > Additional power settings > Choose what the power buttons do

Do not power off from the mains without first shutting down Windows.

cheers, Paul

p.s. to add a screenshot, save the shot as a PNG and attach, don’t save it as a PDF

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Another item that can slow things down is if the BIOS is set to perform diagnostic tests during boot up (the maintenance guy might have enabled this while T/S your problem and forgot to disable it.)

It only performs the tests during a cold-boot (i.e. PC was completely powered off) not during a warm-boot (i.e. you selected restart in Windows.)

This setting is typically in the BIOS start up/boot settings section and will be called something like “quick boot”, “self-test”, “diagnostic test” or possible “memory test”.

Normally, the default setting is run the tests so you’d need to switch it to its non-default value.

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There is a setting I do not like to use, called “fast startup”, that changes shutdown and restart into a sort of sleep mode.  It could be part of this.  https://www.howtogeek.com/243901/the-pros-and-cons-of-windows-10s-fast-startup-mode/

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Fast startup is only for older machines without an SSD IMO. Turn it off if you have an SSD – it can be problematic.

BTW, I hibernate so that Windows comes back to the same place I left it – takes about 20 seconds.

cheers, Paul

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