Is there a way to trace long boot times with Win 8.1?

L

loafer87gt

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 2, 2005
Messages
471
Since doing the spring update, my computer takes forever to boot up. I had actually restored my machine from backups twice thinking my install was borked, as sat on the loading screen with no hard drive activity and the windows circle just spinning. Last night I let it sit on the spinning windows loading screen, and 56 minutes later and a flurry of hard disk activity later I finally got my desktop. Here is what I have tried:

1. Checked hard disk for errors. Doesn't seem to be the case. New Crucial 960GB M500
2. Disabled Fast boot - Heard that this sometimes can cause boot time problems
3. Have tried booting with and without external hard drives connected. Same boot time of just under an hour with both options.

So I am wondering, is there something that will tell me what on gods earth my computron is doing during that 50 minutes + of idle time where there is no hard disk activity?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 
Well, I had time to reboot my machine this evening do a boot trace and it booted much faster this time, taking only about a half hour to boot. I ended up with a 4.8 GB etl file that tells me that 3503 log items were lost because the buffers were overflowed. I tried opening the file to see if I could identify any problems, but it looks like Greek to me. Is there any other way besides sharing the 4.8GB etl file to see if any kind soul is able to troubleshoot the log file?
 
I once had a hard drive "partially" die - it took about that long to open Windows. It passed Chkdsk but when I did a drive speed test in Nero (which is a really simple test but good enough) it came back as ~40 KB/sec. Yes, KB as in kilobytes. Damn! I was surprised that it could slow down that much yet still return good data.
 
Hoppefully that is not the case! Crucial M500 SSD speeds seem at or above reviews I have found online. I thing I did find when going through my Windows Event logs were an abundance of VSS errors. Checking through my Macrium reflect logs, it seems that my last couple of backups had been aborted due to VSS problems. I did a fix provided on Macriums site to de-register and re-register the service and after doing this the error went away. I can't say I have ever had so many strange problems with a machine as I have had with Windows 8.1 . Maybe this is because is because I didn't do clean install of the OS like I did with Windows 8.
 
There seems to be a long delay in the "pre session init" phase in the trace you provided (which, by the way, was really fun to load.. xperfview was using almost 9GB of RAM to view it), which is:

The PreSMSS subphase begins when the kernel is invoked. During this subphase, the kernel initializes data structures and components. It also starts the PnP manager, which initializes the BOOT_START drivers that were loaded during the OSLoader phase.
Click to expand...

Drivers that are required to load during the boot process include the storage controller, so it could very well be the SSD being faulty. Have you tried running some tests on it to see if it's the culprit? Do some performance/health tests with HD Tune or find the SMART data with some program, etc.
 
Hmm, I wonder if crucial caching drive could be the culprit. I have lost my data on its target drive twice, although I dont know how to test the drive as it disappears from device manager once configured. I am also running the Win 7 drivers for it under compatibility mode as Dataplex never released official win 8 software for the drive. Thank you so much for taking a look at things, it now gives me a place to start looking.
 
Strange. I installed the latest Nvidia drivers last night but this time choosing the express install which includes the Steroscopic 3d and audio drivers and my machine now boots almost instantly. To double check things, I reinstalled the drivers, choosing to install only the graphics and Physix drivers, and skipping the stereoscopic and audio, and my boot times go back up to about an hour wait. Reinstalled with express again with the full suite, and all is good again.

Very strange.
 
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