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#1
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Did W10's safe mode do something to fix its very slow boot up during normal boot?
Hello.
Last week, I was trying to fix a client's Intel NUC PC that was having a very slow boot up that took like 5-10 minutes to complete. It basically got stuck during the Intel(C) NUC text screen for that long and then finally went to W10's recovery blue screen with options (http://imgur.com/a/0BfYdUk for a couple blurry photos from my iPhone 4S). I pressed the USB keyboard's Esc key and went to its recovery's safe mode. It started up W10 very fast. I logged in, looked around, ran disk check (chkdsk) and found no problems, etc. Everything was fine. I decided to reboot and it booted up fast! I tried shutting down and starting up the PC, and no problems. What happened? Did safe mode fix something? I did noticed the free disk space (flash) was about 6 GB out of 32 GB. Is this the problem? Thank you for reading, and hopefully answering. -- Quote of the Week: "As a thinker and planner, the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man..." --Mark Twain Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly. /\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://aqfl.net & http://antfarm.home.dhs.org / / /\ /\ \ http://antfarm.ma.cx. Please nuke ANT if replying by e-mail. | |o o| | \ _ / ( ) |
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#2
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Did W10's safe mode do something to fix its very slow boot up during normal boot?
Ant wrote:
Last week, I was trying to fix a client's Intel NUC PC that was having a very slow boot up that took like 5-10 minutes to complete. It basically got stuck during the Intel(C) NUC text screen for that long and then finally went to W10's recovery blue screen with options (http://imgur.com/a/0BfYdUk for a couple blurry photos from my iPhone 4S). I pressed the USB keyboard's Esc key and went to its recovery's safe mode. It started up W10 very fast. I logged in, looked around, ran disk check (chkdsk) and found no problems, etc. Everything was fine. I decided to reboot and it booted up fast! I tried shutting down and starting up the PC, and no problems. What happened? Did safe mode fix something? I did noticed the free disk space (flash) was about 6 GB out of 32 GB. Is this the problem? Thank you for reading, and hopefully answering. During boot (and even before you get to select safe mode), the OS will probe the hardware and load the driver for it. In logging mode during boot, it looks like a driver might be stalling on load but that is not the one that is installing. The boot log screen shows you the driver that just got loaded successfully, not the one that is loading. So, what you see in the boot log is not on which driver the boot got stalled but the one that just finished loading okay. It is the next driver in the boot order that is stalling but for which you don't get shown which one it is. Yeah, makes a lot of sense, uh huh. Microsoft should show "Driver name loading ..." followed by "Driver load status (OK|ERROR|status)"; however, that means 2 messages for each driver load attempt. While it looks like the NIC is not responding quicking to the hardware probe or its driver load, the stall is actually for whatever is the next hardware that is getting its driver loaded that is stalling. You can use SysInternals' loadord.exe (32-bit) or loadord64 (64-bit) to see the order of the drivers loaded on boot. Whichever was the one that was last shown in the boot log, use bootord to see what would be the next driver to load that the boot log won't show until after it has loaded. The boot log shows what managed to get load*ED*, not what is currently load*ING*. In the boot log or load order, you would target the stalling driver by seeing which was the one after the last one you saw in the boot log before the stall happened. I've not yet had to diagnose boot driver failures or stalls under Windows 10. The above regards how the boot log works under Windows XP and 7, in that you don't get to see which driver is stalling but only what was the last driver that loaded okay. When you enable boot logging, you see the log on the screen during the boot up. Also, the boot log gets copied into C:\Windows\ntbtlog.txt, a text file you can view in Notepad. Unfortunately, the boot log does not show the time for the driver load to complete perhaps because some are loaded in parallel (not serially as shown in the log). For more details regarding boot time performance, see: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/make-...ce-diagnostics Alas, the policy cannot be set using the group policy editor (gpedit.msc) for user of the Home editions of Windows. The policy editor only comes with Profession editions, or higher. Microsoft figures home users are incapable of doing diagnostics or deciding which policies to enable/disable or how to configure them. All policies are registry entries, so it is possible to edit the registry to enable the boot performance diagnostic service in Windows. https://www.windows-security.org/59d...xecution-level That mentions the registry settings for the policy (but not the value for EnabledScenarioExecutionLevel). https://getadmx.com/?Category=Window...tionPoli cy_3 That one mentions the values; however, the navpath is different. My recollection is that policies get a hash value that is assigned by the OS and perhaps why the 2nd article has a GUID for the policy. The WDI subkey is not present in my Windows 7 installation, so its absence just means the defaults are used and you need to define the key and its data value(s) to use something other than the defaults. This new tool from Microsoft replaces their older Xperf boot performance tool. I've seen updates and software installs that don't complete correctly upon a reboot (which sometimes they don't notify the user about). A normal reboot (from normal mode to reboot back into normal mode) doesn't get the install completed. Sometimes booting into Safe Mode and then just rebooting into normal mode gets the install or update to complete correctly. Could've been a dependency in the install or update that obstructed the completion, or a conflict with other software that loads during a normal mode boot up. With a safe mode boot, you eliminate the non-critical startup programs and services which can let the install or update complete without the interferrence. |
#3
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Did W10's safe mode do something to fix its very slow boot up during normal boot?
It happened again earlier today. This time I didn't do a safe mode. I did
notice it did a scan and repair. I think Windows Updates failed or something since its history said it failed. Probably lack of free space on this 32 GB since I saw 6 GB free after it was done. Ant wrote: Hello. Last week, I was trying to fix a client's Intel NUC PC that was having a very slow boot up that took like 5-10 minutes to complete. It basically got stuck during the Intel(C) NUC text screen for that long and then finally went to W10's recovery blue screen with options (http://imgur.com/a/0BfYdUk for a couple blurry photos from my iPhone 4S). I pressed the USB keyboard's Esc key and went to its recovery's safe mode. It started up W10 very fast. I logged in, looked around, ran disk check (chkdsk) and found no problems, etc. Everything was fine. I decided to reboot and it booted up fast! I tried shutting down and starting up the PC, and no problems. What happened? Did safe mode fix something? I did noticed the free disk space (flash) was about 6 GB out of 32 GB. Is this the problem? Thank you for reading, and hopefully answering. -- Quote of the Week: "As a thinker and planner, the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man..." --Mark Twain Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly. /\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://aqfl.net & http://antfarm.home.dhs.org / / /\ /\ \ http://antfarm.ma.cx. Please nuke ANT if replying by e-mail. | |o o| | \ _ / ( ) |
#4
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Did W10's safe mode do something to fix its very slow boot up during normal boot?
Ant wrote:
It happened again earlier today. This time I didn't do a safe mode. I did notice it did a scan and repair. I think Windows Updates failed or something since its history said it failed. Probably lack of free space on this 32 GB since I saw 6 GB free after it was done. If WU is offering multiple updates, did you try one at a time instead of trying to install all of them at the same time? If that doesn't work, you may have to delete the local download cache and catalog: - Go to the C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download folder. - Press CTRL+A to select all files and subfolders. - Hit the Delete key. - Run services.msc and start the Windows Update service. More robust instructions can be found online, like: https://www.maketecheasier.com/delet...-update-cache/ https://pureinfotech.com/reset-windo...oads-installs/ Also, if you run the cleanup wizard (cleanmgr), select the OS drive, select System Files, and select the same OS drive again, one of the choices is "Windows Update Cleanup". Never done it that way, so I don't know how thorough it is. When you run the WU client the next time, it will have to rebuild all the dependencies and read all the manifests from the WSUS server to rebuild the local catalog to determine what updates are already installed and which ones are then available for download. |
#5
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Did W10's safe mode do something to fix its very slow boot upduring normal boot?
Ant wrote:
It happened again earlier today. This time I didn't do a safe mode. I did notice it did a scan and repair. I think Windows Updates failed or something since its history said it failed. Probably lack of free space on this 32 GB since I saw 6 GB free after it was done. 1) Make a list of the KB item(s) that failed. 2) Disconnect the affected computer from the network. 3) On your technician/repair computer, using the OS of your choice, contact this site https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/ and enter the KB numbers one at a time, select the appropriate one ("Windows 10" "64 bit" and so on). Download the KB as a .msu file. 4) Take the collection of .msu files over to the afflicted machine. Install one of the .msu files. Reboot. Repeat until all are installed and show as "Success" in the Windows Update history page. Maybe you can get it done that way. If you don't have 1809 installed on the machine (17763), be aware that 1903 will be coming soon, and machines at 1803 will be in a rush now to update to 1809. Machines with 32GB eMMC are likely to be last to receive the OS. If the update asks to connect additional storage (an SD or a USB flash), this can help juggle the space until the OS Upgrade is done. An OS Upgrade through Windows Update, preserves user data and programs. It creates a new Windows folder, but it doesn't replace everything by a long shot. There will be things like registry files that will be "migrated", not "copied". Paul |
#6
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Did W10's safe mode do something to fix its very slow boot up during normal boot?
I wrote down what I did and saw earlier today:
11:20 AM: Intel NUC's black screen start/boot up screen resulted again a long wait like on 2/12/2019 after being powered off for hours to physically move it and then back on. Waited over 10 minutes too, and it finally timed out, did an automatic scan and repair on C: (never saw this last week, but then I wasn't watching it the whole time -- probably went to the restroom or the big warehouse area for Dell Optiplex 380), and then took me to W10's recovery screen (same Error code: 0xc0000001) again like last time as shown in my last week's blurry iPhone 4S photos (http://imgur.com/a/0BfYdUk). I noticed NUC PC was off for me being too idled too long. Its USB keyboard and mouse didn't wake it up. I had to press its power button to turn it on and boot back up. I saw it doing updates and rebooted a few times. It went back in Windows. C: had 6.38 GB free out of 27.8 GB. Its shutdown options showed there were updates, so I went ahead to install them and reboot. I had to do this twice. No problems. W10 was at v1803 (OS build 17134.590) as shown in https://imgur.com/a/9JvCT0D. I noticed it had past failures with v1803 comulative update (2019-02; KB4487017) last week. I am going to guess this was related to the slow start up and having to reboot many times to update. Also, maybe related to lack of free disk space on C: that was about 6 GB. I also ran WU manually again, and there were more to get (1809). C:'s free disk space went down to 2 GB. However, installing these updates told me insufficient disk space and told me to free up C: drive that was about 2 GB free. I ran Disk Cleanup to clear out old datas like previous updates that took a very long time (about a hour(?) and even took my lunch break) with very high CPU and low disk activities. 2:20 PM: After I came back from my lunch break, I woke the sleeping PC up and it was finally done and C: had 3.23 GB free. I decided to delay these new updates and work on disk imaging issue to make a back up in case these updates fail. I rebooted and shut down the PC to be sure everything still work. And it was and fast to start up. 2:45 PM: Downloaded and installed Macrium Reflect v7.2.4063 (2/18/2019) free through/via its 5 MB downloader from https://updates.macrium.com/reflect/v7/ReflectDLHF.exe from https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree. Ran disk clone from C: to D: with its defaults including adding Reflect's WinPE into the SSD. Rebooted into its WinPE automatically, but it failed to restore to the bigger drive with its MapAndValidateXML error. I did this twice too. In this Reflect's WinPE, I did its disk clone like I did in W10 and that worked. 3:30 PM - 3:50 PM: Since this SSD clone would take a while. 3:50 PM - 4:30 PM: SSD clone was a partial success since it autorebooted back to W10, but its destination partitions were in their wrong sizes (same exact sizes as the originals!). I had to repeat my SSD cloning and look at its options carefully. It was confusing at first, but I figured out how to do it by drag and dropping each partition one by one to the bigger destination drive after reading https://blog.macrium.com/techie-tues...k-764bed0ad6e1. I had to figure out Intel's visual UEFI BIOS & CMOS since I have never used it before since I always used the legacy text BIOS in the past. I managed to make it always boot up the new SSD. Now, I see 84.1 GB free on 110 GB now on C drive. This NUC PC currently has two SSD with W10. I uninstalled Macrium Reflect's WinPE and its softwares out of the bigger SSD. I rebooted and everything was still working (no multi-boot options too) off the bigger SSD. I have not retried installing the newer W10 updates. At least, I have a backup to try them later. Ant wrote: It happened again earlier today. This time I didn't do a safe mode. I did notice it did a scan and repair. I think Windows Updates failed or something since its history said it failed. Probably lack of free space on this 32 GB since I saw 6 GB free after it was done. Ant wrote: Hello. Last week, I was trying to fix a client's Intel NUC PC that was having a very slow boot up that took like 5-10 minutes to complete. It basically got stuck during the Intel(C) NUC text screen for that long and then finally went to W10's recovery blue screen with options (http://imgur.com/a/0BfYdUk for a couple blurry photos from my iPhone 4S). I pressed the USB keyboard's Esc key and went to its recovery's safe mode. It started up W10 very fast. I logged in, looked around, ran disk check (chkdsk) and found no problems, etc. Everything was fine. I decided to reboot and it booted up fast! I tried shutting down and starting up the PC, and no problems. What happened? Did safe mode fix something? I did noticed the free disk space (flash) was about 6 GB out of 32 GB. Is this the problem? Thank you for reading, and hopefully answering. -- Quote of the Week: "As a thinker and planner, the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man..." --Mark Twain Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly. /\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://aqfl.net & http://antfarm.home.dhs.org / / /\ /\ \ http://antfarm.ma.cx. Please nuke ANT if replying by e-mail. | |o o| | \ _ / ( ) |
#7
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Did W10's safe mode do something to fix its very slow boot upduring normal boot?
Ant wrote:
I wrote down what I did and saw earlier today: 11:20 AM: Intel NUC's black screen start/boot up screen resulted again a long wait like on 2/12/2019 after being powered off for hours to physically move it and then back on. Waited over 10 minutes too, and it finally timed out, did an automatic scan and repair on C: (never saw this last week, but then I wasn't watching it the whole time -- probably went to the restroom or the big warehouse area for Dell Optiplex 380), and then took me to W10's recovery screen (same Error code: 0xc0000001) again like last time as shown in my last week's blurry iPhone 4S photos (http://imgur.com/a/0BfYdUk). I noticed NUC PC was off for me being too idled too long. Its USB keyboard and mouse didn't wake it up. I had to press its power button to turn it on and boot back up. I saw it doing updates and rebooted a few times. It went back in Windows. C: had 6.38 GB free out of 27.8 GB. Its shutdown options showed there were updates, so I went ahead to install them and reboot. I had to do this twi ce. No problems. W10 was at v1803 (OS build 17134.590) as shown in https://imgur.com/a/9JvCT0D. I noticed it had past failures with v1803 comulative update (2019-02; KB4487017) last week. I am going to guess this was related to the slow start up and having to reboot many times to update. Also, maybe related to lack of free disk space on C: that was about 6 GB. I also ran WU manually again, and there were more to get (1809). C:'s free disk space went down to 2 GB. However, installing these updates told me insufficient disk space and told me to free up C: drive that was about 2 GB free. I ran Disk Cleanup to clear out old datas like previous updates that took a very long time (about a hour(?) and even took my lunch break) with very high CPU and low disk activities. 2:20 PM: After I came back from my lunch break, I woke the sleeping PC up and it was finally done and C: had 3.23 GB free. I decided to delay these new updates and work on disk imaging issue to make a back up in case these updates fail. I rebooted and shut down the PC to be sure everything still work. And it was and fast to start up. 2:45 PM: Downloaded and installed Macrium Reflect v7.2.4063 (2/18/2019) free through/via its 5 MB downloader from https://updates.macrium.com/reflect/v7/ReflectDLHF.exe from https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree. Ran disk clone from C: to D: with its defaults including adding Reflect's WinPE into the SSD. Rebooted into its WinPE automatically, but it failed to restore to the bigger drive with its MapAndValidateXML error. I did this twice too. In this Reflect's WinPE, I did its disk clone like I did in W10 and that worked. 3:30 PM - 3:50 PM: Since this SSD clone would take a while. 3:50 PM - 4:30 PM: SSD clone was a partial success since it autorebooted back to W10, but its destination partitions were in their wrong sizes (same exact sizes as the originals!). I had to repeat my SSD cloning and look at its options carefully. It was confusing at first, but I figured out how to do it by drag and dropping each partition one by one to the bigger destination drive after reading https://blog.macrium.com/techie-tues...k-764bed0ad6e1. I had to figure out Intel's visual UEFI BIOS & CMOS since I have never used it before since I always used the legacy text BIOS in the past. I managed to make it always boot up the new SSD. Now, I see 84.1 GB free on 110 GB now on C drive. This NUC PC currently has two SSD with W10. I uninstalled Macrium Reflect's WinPE and its softwares out of the bigger SSD. I rebooted and everything was still working (no multi-boot options too) off the bigger SSD. I have not retried installing the newer W10 updates. At least, I have a backup to try them later. Ant wrote: It happened again earlier today. This time I didn't do a safe mode. I did notice it did a scan and repair. I think Windows Updates failed or something since its history said it failed. Probably lack of free space on this 32 GB since I saw 6 GB free after it was done. Ant wrote: Hello. Last week, I was trying to fix a client's Intel NUC PC that was having a very slow boot up that took like 5-10 minutes to complete. It basically got stuck during the Intel(C) NUC text screen for that long and then finally went to W10's recovery blue screen with options (http://imgur.com/a/0BfYdUk for a couple blurry photos from my iPhone 4S). I pressed the USB keyboard's Esc key and went to its recovery's safe mode. It started up W10 very fast. I logged in, looked around, ran disk check (chkdsk) and found no problems, etc. Everything was fine. I decided to reboot and it booted up fast! I tried shutting down and starting up the PC, and no problems. What happened? Did safe mode fix something? I did noticed the free disk space (flash) was about 6 GB out of 32 GB. Is this the problem? Thank you for reading, and hopefully answering. If a Windows Upgrade is coming in, and it is short of disk storage, it should be requesting additional storage before it begins. At least on some other WU Upgrades, it would ask for an SD or a USB stick, on a tablet. Macrium does not need to be "drag and drop". If you do that, you run the risk of disturbing the "boot editing" it does. You can still fix booting using the menu item on the CD, and perhaps that's in the disk-based WinPE version too. To clone in Macrium: 1) Tick the partitions you want cloned. 2) Select the disk to clone to. 3) Click the Next button. 4) Click the Back button. 5) The target disk should now have partition sizes like the source. Click the right-most partition and look for the middle option near the bottom. That option brings up an "alignment and resize" dialog. It allows the right most partition to be resized to take up the slack space. 6) Click Next and continue with the cloning. Macrium is not a Partition Manager. For more complex cases, you would want to "move" the right-most partition, "resize" the left partition, "resize" the right partition, or whatever. Free partition tools tend to do as much as Windows itself does (which is not much), in allowing resize but not moving the origin of the partition. You can use Linux and GParted and your own trickery to achieve more ambitious results. For example, a couple days ago, I moved a Linux OS from being a Primary, to being a Logical, something that GParted doesn't support. It was easy. Backup the partition using "dd". Delete the partition. Make an Extended. Make a logical of precisely the same size as the original 14500MB. "dd" the image back to /dev/sda5. Once that is done, I could resize with GParted as desired and make a /dev/sda6 to install another Linux. Without spending any money at all, I was able to get what I wanted. I was dumped into grub-rescue for my cheekiness, but I have a recipe in my notes file for booting when the /boot doesn't match the GRUB original config info. Then a grub-install followup makes the config align with the OS being on a logical. ******* I don't know if running SMART readout on your two flash based devices is going to tell you anything or not. The eMMC probably does not have nearly the same IOP or bandwidth rating of the SSD. The eMMC would have the zero seek time, which is a contributor to the perception of speed. It does sound though, like the eMMC is a bit sick, and not performing as fast as it did when new. It's hard to say whether it has good wear leveling, or is little better than a USB flash stick (which to me, doesn't seem to have wear leveling, based on some failure cases). There's no particular reason for an eMMC to be fast, and it could be asymmetric like a cheesy USB3 flash stick (100MB/sec read, 10MB/sec write). With the additional space now via the new SSD, your Upgrade should be able to execute in style, and even make itself an unnecessary hiberfil.sys for itself. (Which you can remove with powercfg /h off later, once the Upgrade is finished.) Paul |
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