HP Pavilion 23-H019D Very Long POST

[NinerV]

Hi, I started having this issue of a long POST time a few weeks ago and I decided just a few days back to clone the internal HDD to a Crucial BX500 1TB SSD and swapped them. Even after switching to the SSD, the POST time still takes a long time, the shortest being 30-45 minutes and the longest being more than 1 hour long.

After cloning, I did some digging around and saw that this particular Windows Service "App Readiness" could possibly be the cause of this slow POST time. I disabled it and true enough the POST time took seconds instead of hours and everything functioned well and fast. Afterward, I installed Norton anti-virus and ran a full scan and discovered that there were a bunch of viruses and malware on this computer and Norton managed to remove them all. However after Norton had removed the malware, the POST issue happened again and this time it was even worse than before. My first boot took over 2 hours to boot into Windows and my second attempt at booting is still counting at well over 2 and a half hours. I can roughly confirm that it is not the SSD's fault as I tried it in my own custom PC and it boots up with no issues and is fast as well.

Is there anything I can do to fix this issue? Any help would be deeply appreciated as i've been trying to solve this issue for the past 3 days.

I am unsure of the machine specs, but when I swapped out the HDD I also upgraded the RAM from the default 8GB(4x2) to 16GB(8x2).

[BeemerBiker]

1  Bring up the event viewer and look for timeouts in system (check Applications also).   Before I removed McAfee I found repeating 30 second timeouts including attempts to make a secure connection to a non existent server.  I am not familiar with Norton.  Please check security settings and verify that Defender is not running. It should not happened but rarely both apps are running that that causes timeouts as each app want to scan the same file.

2. You may not be getting disk diagnostic reports.  Hard Drive Sentinel has a trial version

https://www.hdsentinel.com/download.php

3.  Try MalwareBytes . It can run concurrently with Defender. Not sure about Norton or McAfee.

https://www.malwarebytes.com/mwb-download

[edit] Even though the delay is before the post, a review of the event log can be useful.

During the long delay did the system attempt to repeatedly boot?  Fans stop, then a few seconds later start and keep repeating?