Win7 Boot Delay Problem

G

Grall

Invisible Member
Legend
I'm getting odd delays where windows just sits there doing absolutely nothing during bootup, and then it continues as if nothing happens. It's somewhere after the Win7 logo morphing into place, but before the video driver kicks in, so I have to sit there listening to my GPU fans going full belt as well during this whole time.

I checked the event log, and it reports these delays as event ID 100 startup errors, but from what I can tell from all the cryptic shit windows puts into that log, it doesn't actually ever state WHAT EXACTLY CAUSED IT. I tried submitting a few events the Great Satan of software, and the response was a big fat nothing.

Is there some way to force Win7 to make a printout of the files it's running as it boots up instead of those four colored spheres (other than forcing safe mode, coz the error never seems to happen there).

This is rather infuriating as I use an Intel SLC SSD as system drive, and bootup times are otherwise lightning quick when this error doesn't occur...


XML of one of the event log entries:

- <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
- <System>
<Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance" Guid="{CFC18EC0-96B1-4EBA-961B-622CAEE05B0A}" />
<EventID>100</EventID>
<Version>2</Version>
<Level>2</Level>
<Task>4002</Task>
<Opcode>34</Opcode>
<Keywords>0x8000000000010000</Keywords>
<TimeCreated SystemTime="2010-07-02T07:46:46.658357700Z" />
<EventRecordID>1280</EventRecordID>
<Correlation ActivityID="{00000100-0000-0004-CD57-C140B919CB01}" />
<Execution ProcessID="1504" ThreadID="1160" />
<Channel>Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance/Operational</Channel>
<Computer>BLABLABLA</Computer>
<Security UserID="S-1-5-19" />
</System>
- <EventData>
<Data Name="BootTsVersion">2</Data>
<Data Name="BootStartTime">2010-07-02T07:36:15.624800200Z</Data>
<Data Name="BootEndTime">2010-07-02T07:46:44.156214600Z</Data>
<Data Name="SystemBootInstance">454</Data>
<Data Name="UserBootInstance">452</Data>
<Data Name="BootTime">95904</Data>
<Data Name="MainPathBootTime">73304</Data>
<Data Name="BootKernelInitTime">15</Data>
<Data Name="BootDriverInitTime">197</Data>
<Data Name="BootDevicesInitTime">65535</Data>
<Data Name="BootPrefetchInitTime">4845</Data>
<Data Name="BootPrefetchBytes">400646144</Data>
<Data Name="BootAutoChkTime">0</Data>
<Data Name="BootSmssInitTime">4692</Data>
<Data Name="BootCriticalServicesInitTime">190</Data>
<Data Name="BootUserProfileProcessingTime">287</Data>
<Data Name="BootMachineProfileProcessingTime">0</Data>
<Data Name="BootExplorerInitTime">1038</Data>
<Data Name="BootNumStartupApps">16</Data>
<Data Name="BootPostBootTime">22600</Data>
<Data Name="BootIsRebootAfterInstall">false</Data>
<Data Name="BootRootCauseStepImprovementBits">0</Data>
<Data Name="BootRootCauseGradualImprovementBits">0</Data>
<Data Name="BootRootCauseStepDegradationBits">4194304</Data>
<Data Name="BootRootCauseGradualDegradationBits">4194304</Data>
<Data Name="BootIsDegradation">false</Data>
<Data Name="BootIsStepDegradation">false</Data>
<Data Name="BootIsGradualDegradation">false</Data>
<Data Name="BootImprovementDelta">0</Data>
<Data Name="BootDegradationDelta">0</Data>
<Data Name="BootIsRootCauseIdentified">true</Data>
<Data Name="OSLoaderDuration">588</Data>
<Data Name="BootPNPInitStartTimeMS">15</Data>
<Data Name="BootPNPInitDuration">65615</Data>
<Data Name="OtherKernelInitDuration">1310</Data>
<Data Name="SystemPNPInitStartTimeMS">66923</Data>
<Data Name="SystemPNPInitDuration">117</Data>
<Data Name="SessionInitStartTimeMS">67043</Data>
<Data Name="Session0InitDuration">4025</Data>
<Data Name="Session1InitDuration">222</Data>
<Data Name="SessionInitOtherDuration">444</Data>
<Data Name="WinLogonStartTimeMS">71736</Data>
<Data Name="OtherLogonInitActivityDuration">242</Data>
<Data Name="UserLogonWaitDuration">464298</Data>
</EventData>
</Event>
 
I suppose you already know about the wonderful built in troubleshooting tool, msconfig? You should be able to narrow down what might causing the boot stalling. At the worst, you'll narrow it down to the general area of probable causes and at best you'll actually narrow it down to the specific cause.

It does however require a lot of patience and an organized method of either selection or deselection depending on if you want to start with everything disabled (equivalent to safe mode) or start with everything enabled.

Regards,
SB
 
Hm, I knew about it and have used it, but not started it after I switched away from WinXP (maybe once or twice in vista years ago, I'm not sure, but never in 7). It's sure changed a lot over the years. :p I didn't actually remember to think of it now, so cheers for the reminder!

I'm ticking the "No GUI boot", "Boot Log" and "OS Boot Information" checkboxes now and will check what happens later... :D Most of the other stuff like services, startup items and so on only kick in after you log in anyway, and this issue occurs much earlier in the startup process than that. So thankfully I don't have to screw around with that, it'd been a Sisyfosian task considering how much junk is listed there lol.

Thanks for the advice. :)
 
I did a reboot a while back, and it does show text now when it starts up, yay. Unfortunately (fortunately?!), it was a speedy startup this time and the whole process took like 10 seconds at most before I was at the login prompt (not counting this mobo's exorbitantly long POST procedure, which is so slow my older Core2 Quad box with mechanical drives and winvista POSTs + boots winvista to the login prompt in the same time this PC boots up win7 to login from the SSD. Dunno if all core i7 boards POST just as slow, or merely ASUS delivering a slow BIOS for my mobo...)

More research is needed as this issue doesn't occur every time, but I don't feel like force-restarting my box over and over right now, because I'm still suffering the lingering aftereffects of a recent cold and I'm tired due to lack of sleep (coughing thoughout the night) and liable to simply nod off in my chair if I am to sit through repeated reboots lol...
 
Do you, by any chance, have a solid colour as a desktop wallpaper? Try putting a picture there instead.
 
Grall said:
I did a reboot a while back, and it does show text now when it starts up, yay. Unfortunately (fortunately?!), it was a speedy startup this time and the whole process took like 10 seconds at most before I was at the login prompt (not counting this mobo's exorbitantly long POST procedure, which is so slow my older Core2 Quad box with mechanical drives and winvista POSTs + boots winvista to the login prompt in the same time this PC boots up win7 to login from the SSD. Dunno if all core i7 boards POST just as slow, or merely ASUS delivering a slow BIOS for my mobo...)
Click to expand...

Hehe, I hear you on the overly long POSTS of enthusiast motherboards. Each added storage controller for example will add some time to posting. As well if you have LAN boot enabled, and some other stuff.

I really noticed it when I got a no frills mini-ITX MB. Posts faster than my monitor can display the post screen. So the only time I ever get a chance to see the post screen is if there's an error in post or if I enable memory checking. :p

MS is rumored to be working with MB vendors in trying to get POST times lowered by the time Win8 releases.

Regards,
SB
 
MSConfig probably isn't what you need.

Starting in Vista, there is a separate event log for boot performance that will list each service, process and driver that is misbehaving. You can find it in Event Logs -> Application and Service Events -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Something like Diagnostics-Boot or something similar.

That should help you pin it down. I used this log to diagnose something similar -- found an old NV driver causing my Dell Inspiron E1505 to take like 50 seconds to boot -- one driver update later, it was all fixed.
 
SB:
Yeah, this is an enthusiast mobo... ASUS Rampage II Gene uATX. Fastest board + CPU I've ever owned; Core i7 920 @ almost 3.5GHz with 21x multiple turbomode without needing to raise vCore one bit (got all possible powersaving stuff enabled in fact), and 6x2GB 1664MHz DDR3 DIMMs @ 7-7-7-20, but slowest god damn POST ever. And it's not even the add-on storage controller that slows things down either (actually it does, but only about 2 secs or so), vast majority of time is spent in the main POST itself.

Albu:
Thanks for the advice, but I ran the event log viewer already, and you can see an excerpt from what it reports in my original post. :) I'm not sure you can make any more heads or tails of it though than I could, because I don't think it really TELLS ANYTHING.

It seems more like a receipt - predictably bloated with extraneous stuff of course since this IS microsoft after all - than anything else, none of the entries in that log is specifically labelled as the anomaly that caused the error event to be triggered, nor does it mention which device in the PC or which subsystem in Windows itself misbehaved to cause it... Truly unhelpful information, I must say.
 
Grall said:
SB:
Albu:
Thanks for the advice, but I ran the event log viewer already, and you can see an excerpt from what it reports in my original post. :) I'm not sure you can make any more heads or tails of it though than I could, because I don't think it really TELLS ANYTHING.
Click to expand...
Oops, didn't catch that.

Event ID 100 in that log is just the general boot information; it will be in an 'error' status if the boot time IsDegredation() (which yours obviously was.) There will be another entry below it somewhere that gives the specific failure for which device took way too long to start up -- it will be something like an event ID 101, or 110 or thereabouts.
 
My suggestion may sound silly, but it is a bug in Windows 7 that using a solid colour background (not an image) makes booting slower for some people.
 
Bludd said:
My suggestion may sound silly, but it is a bug in Windows 7 that using a solid colour background (not an image) makes booting slower for some people.
Click to expand...

Yes, but it's a consistent slowdown. Per his original post, it's a random slowdown that he's troubleshooting. Your suggestion doesn't match his problem in that regard.
 
Ah, sorry. I misunderstood his problem.

I would try MS Sysinternals' Process Monitor and its boot logging feature. Maybe you can see what is happening in detail during Windows startup.
 
Bludd said:
Ah, sorry. I misunderstood his problem.

I would try MS Sysinternals' Process Monitor and its boot logging feature. Maybe you can see what is happening in detail during Windows startup.
Click to expand...

No worries :) Hope I didn't sound like a dick -- it's a good suggestion, and a lot of people don't know about it.
 
Albuquerque said:
There will be another entry below it somewhere that gives the specific failure for which device took way too long to start up -- it will be something like an event ID 101, or 110 or thereabouts.
Click to expand...
Can't find any such entry... :(

Where specifically should I look? I checked Apps-and-Services -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Diagnostics-Performance. Is this the right place? I'm not very familiar with these under the hood type of OS tools.

Some Warning events have the same timestamp as an Error event, but I don't even know what to look for, as none of them seem to point at anything specific from what I can tell. It's just more of the same type of non-specific junk like the stuff I posted in the original post. Many warning events also don't have any other events logged with a close timestamp. Hours often pass before the next entry in the log shows up...

Blllaaaahhh. :)


Bludd:
I was gonna respond to ya, but it slipped my mind unfortunately. Sorry! Thanks for bothering to reply though. Yes, I use a background picture (the architecture one with a building covered with round discus-like plates, or whatever the hell it is :)).

I guess I forgot about it because when this thing happen (which is not all the time as I mentioned), it happens before the graphics driver is even loaded, so I don't think it's desktop-related... I've been thinking it might be the catalyst driver, but I'm not so sure anymore. It seems to be something prior to that after looking more closely at the screen and the disk activity LED. It winked quite a bit after the pause, but before the screen goes black (which means the video driver is initializing)... I guess now that I have diagnostic boot text activated I'll be able to see more clearly which file it stops at. :)

Also, I'm lazy, heh. I don't want to move over one of my GTX8800s and download/install 100 megs of forceware and endlessly reboot the system just to try and provoke the darn thing into stalling on me... :p
 
I'd like to try that, Richard, but the program's website says basically nothing about what the program does, or how it does it. "Low-level patent-pending frustration-detecting driver technology" sounds more like hocus pocus nonsense than a serious, useful application to me.
 
Msconfig -> Boot -> No GUI boot.

Shaved my boot time in half (on a Intel SSD)

PS.

Bootvis dosn't do anything to alter boot times, it's a myth, incase someone had gotten that idea:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/fastboot/default.mspx

Please note that Bootvis.exe is not a tool that will improve boot/resume performance for end users. Contrary to some published reports, Bootvis.exe cannot reduce or alter a system's boot or resume performance. The boot optimization routines invoked by Bootvis.exe are built into Windows XP. These routines run automatically at pre-determined times as part of the normal operation of the operating system.
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top