Incredibly Slow Boot-Up Following Windows 10 1709 Update

[LoDImas]

Hi Zinou. I am sure I disabled the driver signature verification (as far as I know how it works). What I did was:

At BIOS lebel, I disabled Secure Boot.

Then, I persisted the corresponding boot options with the following commands:

bcdedit.exe /set nointegritychecks on

bcdedit /set testsigning on

I also left in the startup process only the core Microsoft services and core essential services, and no start-up program. So, my boot process is as clean as it can be without uninstalling anything. The boot process before login still takes about 6 minutes. Did I make something wrong while desactivating drivers signature verification?

I am sending you privatelly both the result of the signtool and the last trace.

[Zinou]

Your $MFT file is fragmented and needs to be defragmented;

After you've disabled the boot drivers verification, the boot trace shows that the "session init phase" took less time than before. 146s before. 22s after.

But the logon session remains big !  did you enter your credentials just after the logon screen has been displayed?  or did you wait some seconds ?

To have an accurate boot time measure, you need to use the autologon tool from Sysinternals. it'll allow windows to automatically logon with your credentials without you interacting with the system. this will give us the exact time of the winlogon phase.

After that do the following:

1. Type this command: contig.exe c:$MFT to defrag the $mft metadata file. You can also defragment the other metadata files.
2. Defragment your entire C: drive.
3. activate the Superfetch service and restart your system 6 times. so that the superfetcher will build its database. Superfetch will improve the boot time on systems with a spinning disk, by caching data.
4. Take another boot trace.

[LoDImas]

Hi Zinou,

Understood. I will post you the results when finished all the tasks you are requesting me to do.

I have a few questions:

1.- When you say "restart your system 6 times", you mean just restarting 6 times in the common way, or runing the command xbootmgr -trace boot -prepSystem -verboseReadyBoot (that will force the computer to restart 6 times)?

2.- The Superfecth service was already active and in autostart state in my computer. Do I still need to restart the system 6 times?

3.- How cn I defragment my C drive? When I right click on my C drive, Properties, Tools and then Optimize, nothing happens. Will contig C: defragment the C drive? Do I need to use another command?

4.- Is it safe to defrag with normal boot, or is necessary or preferable to have the computer start in safe mode?

5.- Aside from uninstalling them, is there something I can do to have drivers signature verification enabled but not spending these 146s?

Thank you in advance.

[Zinou]

Hi,

1. If the superfetcher is already enabled then run the xbootmgr command. may be it's broken, because I didn't find the prefetcher graph in the boot trace.
2. You can defrag your C: drive by issuing this command " defrag C: /U /V"
3. Yes you can defrag with normal boot
4. Keep the signature verification disabled until we fix the problem then we will see for a workaround.

[LoDImas]

Hi Zinou,

Sorry for not telling you anything during these days. First of all, I was too busy at work. Second, the actions you requested me were potentially very time consuming; so, I had to wait until free no-workdays, us the laptop that is giving me trouble is the work one.

I did all the actions that you asked me to do. In short, I can tell that the boot process improved a lot. The initial scenario was about 6 minutes to get the login screen. And then, I had to wait about 5 more minutes if I didn’t want a first login mess. So, about eleven minutes. The current situation is about 2 minutes to 20 seconds to get the login screen; and login immediately doesn’t produce a mess. Of this new time, about 54 seconds are for the initial boot screen, all black with the HP logo; 31 seconds are for the next screen, black, with the HP logo and the dotted circle spinning; 2 seconds for the next screen, all black; and 41 seconds for the last one, blue with a dotted circle spinning and a “Please wait” message. Then I get the login screen. Thank you for this big improvement!

What did I do?

First, I took a minimalistic trace of the boot process, that I am sending you privately.

Second, I defragged $Mft and $Security files. Contig claims no other $* file is allowed to be defragged. After this, the boot process already improved from about 6 minutes to 3 minutes and 30 seconds.

Third, I defragged the entire C: drive. This was a little troublesome. Neither through Windows explorer, neither using your command worked properly. Both did nothing. I did further research and discovered that the service “Optimize drives” was disabled. This service must be started in order to be able to defrag. I think this is the initial default status of this service, as I don’t remember having visited it never. Anyway, I enabled it and force it to start automatically. This will assure Windows will try to defrag weekly my C: drive (at low priority). After this, I could run defragui.exe. My drive C: was 20% fragmented (I guess not good). After defragging, the boot process improved again from 3 minutes and 30 seconds to about 3 minutes.

Fourth, I run the xbootmgr boot 6 times command. It took really a lot (about 5 hours). After that, the boot times are the ones I already explained before.

Finally, I took a minimalistic trace of the boot process, that I am sending you privately.

The current situation is now:

- The drivers verification issue still remains.

- The programs that start after login take a long (about 5 minutes) to run. I guess this cannot be helped, as they are quite a lot. Still, any recommendation would be appreciated.

- As mentioned in previous posts, although windows starts properly, it seems to be dormant. Any time I start for the first time a program; or anytime I try to use a common feature (as opening a file, or using the contextual menu anywhere) it takes quite a lot (5 to 20 seconds). This is not as worrying as the long boot process, but still I would like to know if there is scope for improvement.

Thank you!

[Zinou]

Good job !

I took a quick look at the boot trace. Effectively there is an improvement in boot time. However, I noticed that the explorer init phase (when the desktop is displayed) took some time to complete. 

I suspect Intel services (DSAservice and Queencreek) causing this delay. disabled them and see if it helps.

[LoDImas]

Hi Zinou,

I disabled both services, but I noticed no improvement.

[Zinou]

Hi,

most of the delay is caused by high disk I/O. defragmentation has slightly improved the boot time.

But I suspect that BitLocker is slowing down disk I/O operations. When you dig inside the call stacks of system(4) threads, you'll see fvevol.sys module (Bitlocker's driver)  involved.

I'm not 100% sure, but it worth to do a test, by disabling BitLocker and measure the boot time.

[LoDImas]

Hi Zinou,

I double checked it, and, as far as I know and understand, Bitlocker is disabled in my computer and has always been like this. This is the output of the PowerShell comand to check it out:

manage-bde -status

BitLocker Drive Encryption: Configuration Tool version 10.0.17134
Copyright (C) 2013 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Disk volumes that can be protected with
BitLocker Drive Encryption:
Volume C: [Windows]
[OS Volume]

Size: 930,10 GB
BitLocker Version: None
Conversion Status: Fully Decrypted
Percentage Encrypted: 0,0%
Encryption Method: None
Protection Status: Protection Off
Lock Status: Unlocked
Identification Field: None
Key Protectors: None Found

[Zinou]

Ok,

So disable all the unnecessary services and startup programs like DropBoxUpdate, GoogleUpdate, Matlab, SDNotify ...etc.

You can use autoruns of Sysinternals tools to do that.