30 minute startup time

[John8300]

I have an HP 805 G6 running Windows 10.  It has a 5 TB USB portable drive attached and the startup time for the Windows GUI to appear is less than 60 seconds.  If I also attach a 5.25” 10TB USB external WD drive the startup time is around 30 minutes.

 The most recent ‘bios time’ shown in Task Manager - -  > Startup Tab is 1732 seconds.

After I restart the computer I see a completely black screen for around 7 minutes.  The remainder of the time the monitor shows the HP SureStart logo.

Windows is installed on the PC’s internal M.2 drive. There are no page files on any drive except the internal M.2.   As far as I know there is nothing on the 10TB drive that should in any way be a part of the startup process.

 I would suspect this is a problem with the drive but I have a second instance of the same model drive and if I swap drives I see the same long times.  It seems unlikely that both drives would have the same unique hardware problem and it also seems unlikely that other users of this model of drive live with the same 30-minute startup times.

Fast Startup is disabled.  The bios is current.

Any ideas?

[Bill_To]

Hi @John8300 

Check Startup in Task Manager to look for a clue as to what specific app or apps is/are causing the 1732 second startup time.

Try disabling this startup app.

My longest startup app has a 2063 millisecond (ms) startup time with 19.9 MB disk activity. Total startup time is 9.6 seconds.

Regards

[John8300]

On first reading your reply I didn't notice how you had configured the Startup tab to show actual numeric times.  I didn't know that was possible, so thanks alerting me to that.  

So as an experiment, I tried the brute force approach and temporarily disabled all startup apps.  That decreased my boot time but it only decreased it to 26 minutes.   Something is happening here but I'm still lost as to what it is.

[Bill_To]

Hi @John8300 

My pleasure. A two minute drop in startup time is not good after disabling all startup apps.

You also indicated two, identical drives do this on this PC. How are startup times when using these drives on different PCs?

Some startup process related to this drive, which is not showing in Task Manager, is running. Maybe a boot time A-V scan??

I am out of ideas. Maybe a different Forum member has some insight?

Regards

[John8300]

You asked a logical question. I didn't reply immediately because I wanted to do some experimenting first.

The simple answer is that in today's testing the problem occurs on my PC but not on my wife's (which is the same model).  I also don't remember it occurring on an older PC that I was using when I bought the drive.

From there, things get murky.  I've been putting up with the problem for nearly a year because I just never had the time to look into it.  I've just been unplugging the drive every time I reboot but that's getting pretty old.

Now here's why I say murky.  Although I couldn't reproduce the problem today on my wife's PC I do remember her complaining about slow startup several months ago.  I didn't look into it because she so rarely reboots it would be a waste of time to try to fix it.   But if her comment was another instance of this same problem I can't say it never occurs on her PC.

Conversely on my PC, the problem is very repeatable.  But there have been a few occassions over many months when I was deep in thought, concentrating on some problem or another, rebooted without first unplugging the drive, and later asked myself --- wait, what just happened?  Didn't the PC start quickly even though the drive was plugged in?

[Bill_To]

Hi @John8300 

I don't have external drives connected to the PC on a continuous basis. I only connect external USB drives when doing backup/recovery operations or when retrieving/saving files needed to accomplish a specific task.

Try a different external USB drive, if possible, to see if the problem replicates.

Very tough to determine if the current external drive is causing this or the operating system is scanning the drive prior to Windows loading.

Have you checked Task Scheduler for any unusual startup items related to this drive?

You might want to look at Microsoft Autoruns to check various startup processes.

Regards

[John8300 · Accepted solution]

You mentioned task scheduler, autoruns, and task manager.  I looked through those but didn't see anything obvious.

However, that made me think of process explorer.  When I looked through process explorer I could see that the process "system", and all other processes, did not start until at least 25 minutes after I started the computer.  So the extremely long boot delay I experienced was primarily occuring in the bios, not in Windows itself.  That made me wonder if the slow boot times might be due to firmware on the HP computer (such as 'SureStart') that is looking for malware.

Although I don't actually execute software from the large external USB drive it does have a large number of executables that I saved over many years.  I deleted several large folders, restared my PC, and the old 30 minute boot time iwas down to 15 minutes.  Now as time permits I need to go through the folders on the external drive and see what it is that I really need to keep.

Thanks for your persistence on this problem.  I have more work to do but at least I now know what the problem is.

By the way, in working on this I discovered another diagnostic tool which I hadn't been aware of.  Google "Fix Slow Windows Startup Using Windows Boot Performance Diagnostics".  That article describes how to
invoke the tool but unless I missed something, it doesn't say where to find the results.  After more googling I found out where, it's in Applications and Services Logs Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance/Operational.

Again, thanks for your help.