Weird Windows 10 Startup Behaviour

[meenmeen1103]

Ok so I recently have this issue where after a normal shutdown, windows goes bonkers right before getting to the desktop. The screen flashes on the loading screen that normally shows up when it waits for you to login (right after the spinny dot-circle thingy) and never actually loads the desktop. I don't use a login password btw. This ONLY happens after a shutdown, not after a restart or waking from sleep. I can attempt to power the system on, and then forcefully shut it off as it has the spinny circle thingy shows up to next prompt windows to load the advanced options/recovery page on startup, do a simple restart without actually going into any of the optional startups like safe mode, and it'll load completely normal afterward until I do the next shutdown. The only recent changes were me enabling Hyper-V in the Windows features to play around with an XP VM. I believe I had this host system initially set with a disabled paging file since I have an SSD boot drive and 32gb ram, never had any issues previously but with VMs, obviously having a paging file is crucial, and Hyper-V set one anyway. Hyper-V is disabled now, have tried with various paging file sizes up to 4gb and also without one like it had been before. Issue persists.

Any advice?

Also, upon further research I absolutely don't care if I have a paging file set up or not (since it's not likely to be of any actual benefit to SSD+big ram combos anyway) I just want the ability to power up normally from a shutdown again.

[Enderman]

Sounds like you've screwed up windows by disabling settings that you're not supposed to touch.

Maybe do a clean install?

[meenmeen1103]

5 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Sounds like you've screwed up windows by disabling settings that you're not supposed to touch.

Maybe do a clean install?

Well I had disabled the pagefile system well over 2 years ago if that's what you mean about disabling settings, and the above issue didn't happen until two days ago. I would think enabling the pagefile now would resolve it if that were the source of the issue but I get the same result with it on or off. I'm not completely opposed to a fresh install though, enough time has passed since the initial install, however, I've only the original 8.1 pro disc I upgraded to 10 from so not entirely sure how to go about doing a fresh 10 install using my digital license

[Enderman]

1 minute ago, meenmeen1103 said:

Well I had disabled the pagefile system well over 2 years ago if that's what you mean about disabling settings, and the above issue didn't happen until two days ago. I would think enabling the pagefile now would resolve it if that were the source of the issue but I get the same result with it on or off. I'm not completely opposed to a fresh install though, enough time has passed since the initial install, however, I've only the original 8.1 pro disc I upgraded to 10 from so not entirely sure how to go about doing a fresh 10 install using my digital license

So are you saying that you never clean installed windows 10? You just upgraded from 8.1?

That would definitely be why you're having issues.

Often the issues only become noticeable after a few months or years, when an update tries to install on a partially corrupted OS and makes the issues noticeable.

Here is how you do a proper clean install: https://www.howtogeek.com/224342/how-to-clean-install-windows-10/ https://www.windowscentral.com/how-do-clean-installation-windows-10

[meenmeen1103]

On 3/24/2018 at 8:03 PM, Enderman said:

So are you saying that you never clean installed windows 10? You just upgraded from 8.1?

Correct. It has been a long time coming now I guess, and I've prepared everything for a clean install (reviewed microsoft account info, backed up browers' info like bookmarks, have other account infos on hard copies, redundant copies of file backups etc) one thing though, do you know if a raid setup using the built in storage spaces in the OS will be wiped out with a new install? I have all that info backup up anyway, just curious if I'm also looking at having to copy ~5TB back into a secondary backup

[Enderman]

5 minutes ago, meenmeen1103 said:

Correct. It has been a long time coming now I guess, and I've prepared everything for a clean install (reviewed microsoft account info, backed up browers' info like bookmarks, have other account infos on hard copies, redundant copies of file backups etc) one thing though, do you know if a raid setup using the built in storage spaces in the OS will be wiped out with a new install? I have all that info backup up anyway, just curious if I'm also looking at having to copy ~5TB back into a secondary backup

Yeah all partitions and raid will get removed, so you need everything backed up on non-raided storage if you want to plug it back in after the install.

All non-OS drives should be unplugged during installation.

[meenmeen1103]

2 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Yeah all partitions and raid will get removed, so you need everything backed up on non-raided storage if you want to plug it back in after the install.

All non-OS drives should be unplugged during installation.

Thought so. Backup of current raid is already on non-raided drives, just gonna have to copy back over to newly setup raid once new OS is installed. Would a BIOS set raid bypass that for future reference or will that have the same outcome for this particular situation? I normally only have the intended OS drive plugged in during setup but good call anyway. Thanks for the help

[Enderman]

2 minutes ago, meenmeen1103 said:

Thought so. Backup of current raid is already on non-raided drives, just gonna have to copy back over to newly setup raid once new OS is installed. Would a BIOS set raid bypass that for future reference or will that have the same outcome for this particular situation? I normally only have the intended OS drive plugged in during setup but good call anyway. Thanks for the help

I think the motherboard raid would work through different installs, not 100% sure though.

Motherboard raid and software raid in general suck.

I would not recommend doing raid unless you have a professional raid card.

[meenmeen1103]

2 minutes ago, Enderman said:

I think the motherboard raid would work through different installs, not 100% sure though.

Motherboard raid and software raid in general suck.

I would not recommend doing raid unless you have a professional raid card.

Hmm, might be time to look into that, maybe just nix my current raid 1 for raid 0 or just altogether then since I've gotten more storage space for backups now than when the current raid was initially set up. The windows 10 creation tool is currently downloading the OS so will hopefully have this fresh install going soon.

[0x1e]

I would disable fast boot up.
You can do that within Windows power management.

[meenmeen1103]

16 minutes ago, 0x1e said:

I would disable fast boot up.
You can do that within Windows power management.

Fast boot up has been disabled since like the first week I was testing it out. Was plenty fast with a regular boot up already, and found the fast one buggy as all hell.

[meenmeen1103]

1 hour ago, Enderman said:

I think the motherboard raid would work through different installs, not 100% sure though.

Motherboard raid and software raid in general suck.

I would not recommend doing raid unless you have a professional raid card.

Well, now I'm getting a different issue. The installation media disc is working well up until the disk menu. The only drive connected is the one I had originally installed 8.1 on, but it doesn't want to install 10 on it. "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu." The targeted disk is a Samsung 950 pro m.2. It was working fine before, 8.1 installed on it no issues before, and I used this same current menu to wipe this drive so it's now unallocated space. Makes no difference if I format it using this menu and then create a 'new' partition.

[Enderman]

3 minutes ago, meenmeen1103 said:

Well, now I'm getting a different issue. The installation media disc is working well up until the disk menu. The only drive connected is the one I had originally installed 8.1 on, but it doesn't want to install 10 on it. "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu." The targeted disk is a Samsung 950 pro m.2. It was working fine before, 8.1 installed on it no issues before, and I used this same current menu to wipe this drive so it's now unallocated space. Makes no difference if I format it using this menu and then create a 'new' partition.

So leaving it as unallocated space and clicking next doesn't work?

Maybe look in your bios, click load optimized defaults, and depending on the motherboard you might need to enable to stuff to boot from NVME, search google to see if you can find anything about that.

[meenmeen1103]

1 minute ago, Enderman said:

So leaving it as unallocated space and clicking next doesn't work?

Maybe look in your bios, click load optimized defaults, and depending on the motherboard you might need to enable to stuff to boot from NVME, search google to see if you can find anything about that.

No clicking "next" is not an option, it's grey'ed out, and all defaults have been loaded on BIOS UEFI. Trying my original 8.1 disc now just to see if any options are different and if not I'll try a CMOS reset even though that should have been taken care of by the UEFI defaults (my CPU and RAM overclocks are already wiped).

[meenmeen1103]

8.1 disc did the same, wouldn't let me install on m.2. Cleared CMOS and booting up 10 disc again. Man what a pain lol

[Enderman]

6 minutes ago, meenmeen1103 said:

No clicking "next" is not an option, it's grey'ed out, and all defaults have been loaded on BIOS UEFI. Trying my original 8.1 disc now just to see if any options are different and if not I'll try a CMOS reset even though that should have been taken care of by the UEFI defaults (my CPU and RAM overclocks are already wiped).

Weird, usually you should just be able to click on unallocated space and then click next.

Must be the fact that it's NVME causing issues.

I'm not familiar with getting nvme working for boot so can't help you there unfortunately

[meenmeen1103]

2 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Weird, usually you should just be able to click on unallocated space and then click next.

Must be the fact that it's NVME causing issues.

I'm not familiar with getting nvme working for boot so can't help you there unfortunately

Yeah I'm getting the same issues still. It just won't create a new partition on it. Kinda lost on it atm

[meenmeen1103]

15 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Weird, usually you should just be able to click on unallocated space and then click next.

Must be the fact that it's NVME causing issues.

I'm not familiar with getting nvme working for boot so can't help you there unfortunately

Well I messed with some UEFI settings in BIOS (as in removed all of the legacy options and selected UEFI only for basically everything) and it's installing 10 now, sheesh. Not sure which setting that wasn't reverted by loading defaults or clearing CMOS triggered this but beggars can't be choosers. May take a closer look once the installation is done and I go back into UEFI to re-instate my overclocks but at least I've progress now.

[meenmeen1103]

1 hour ago, Enderman said:

Weird, usually you should just be able to click on unallocated space and then click next.

Must be the fact that it's NVME causing issues.

I'm not familiar with getting nvme working for boot so can't help you there unfortunately

As a heads up, it's installed now and the previous raid array was automatically detected and running fine for now (though I may change that) but going to go forward now with installing all my previous needed programs on the primary drive. Thanks again for the help.