Intermittent boot problem - stuck at spinning dots (sometimes)

Just had the first failed boot after updating the BIOS, so that didn't fix the issue. What I realised is that by taking out any usb device on the front panel while stuck in the spinning dots screen, the keyboard becomes responsive for like a second. System will still not continue to boot but keyboard rgb stays on for a little bit. If I spam any key when this happens, keyboard will stay on for as long as I spam.

Instead of forcing shutdown two times like I always do to get to the troubleshoot screen, I've tried spamming the keyboard so it stays on. System booted properly by doing this.

What's causing this? I'm so confused at this point! Found a temporal fix for it, but spamming my keyboard on every boot isn't ideal.

Update your chipset drivers or your USB 3.0 drivers. Probably Windows tries to initialise the USB devices and gets into some incompatibility.

spapakons said:

Update your chipset drivers or your USB 3.0 drivers. Probably Windows tries to initialise the USB devices and gets into some incompatibility.

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Updated chipset drivers, no luck whatsoever. Anything else I should try? I'll be doing a fresh windows install really soon too

After a new Windows 11 installation, install the chipset/USB drivers first and then the graphics drivers. Don't rely on Windows Update.

Reinstalled OS (I'm running w10 though I know this is a w11 forum). Couldn't fix the issue. Atm I am getting stuck at boot spinning dots screen and my keyboard doesn't turn on after bios post and when w10 logo appears. I really don't know what else to try. Could it be a HDD issue? Maybe one of my secondary drives has trouble getting recognised? Any clues on this appreciated!

I see you also have an SSD - where i presume Windows is installed. Thus, you can unplug the HDD and see if it starts properly without it. Try the same with all the USB devices (Mouse, Keyboard, whatever you have connected) - unplug them all and see if it boots properly without them.

Fast start-up often causes intermittent start issues. Check in power settings, and if it is on, try turning it off.

I'll try to do this throughout this week. I get this issue pretty much only when I boot for the first time every day. I can't reproduce the issue if I shutdown and boot up again :/

cereberus said:

Fast start-up often causes intermittent start issues. Check in power settings, and if it is on, try turning it off.

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Fast startup is turned off

I had that issue with 528.x NVidia drivers on my laptop with 1070. To let the boot proceed I had to remove external mini-DP->DP to the external monitor every single time.
531.41 SD fixed it.

hexaae said:

I had that issue with 528.x NVidia drivers on my laptop with 1070. To let the boot proceed I had to remove external mini-DP->DP to the external monitor every single time.
531.41 SD fixed it.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion, unfortunately after clean installing 531.41 drivers, issue persists in my case :/

Download DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) and run it in Safe Mode to remove the nVidia drivers and any trace of it. Then install latest drivers again and see if that fixes your issue.

Just to leap back into the thread as the OP but I see a few others have similar issues, my issue is still persisting too.

My PC has now been doing this for seven months. I've been trying to track any kind of pattern as to what causes it, but it seems to be a random 1 in 3 (roughly) chance that it fails to boot after being shut down for longer than about 2 hours. I've also updated to the latest 531.41 drivers and it hasnt fixed it (the only noticeable thing they did is create a small pause between the time the spinning circles of bios post disappear and the time the windows login splash wallpaper appears).

The biggest issue with this is trying to diagnose and test because like Heax, when it fails to boot, a power off/on will so far ALWAYS fix the issue, so the only way to test if a fix or hardware swap has worked is to make a change and then run with that change for up to a week and see if it ever fails to boot in that time. It's almost impossible to do a good "boots with X but then fails with Y" comparison, because nothing is stopping it from booting after one power cycle.

There are no logs in the windows event viewer either, which surprised me. It's clearly found windows (the latest 22H2 build changed the spinning dots circles into a spinning ring) so it presumably can't not be recognising my main SSD, and if its hanging here and disabling USB devices I would have assumed it was far enough into the windows boot to start writing logs of fails rather than just completely hang.

Hi! Updates on this. After plenty of troubleshooting and messing with plenty of different stuff (both hardware and software), I'm fairly confident it's my older HDD causing the issue in my case. My setup is OS SSD (sata), old pc HDD, new HDD.

It boots fine with just the SSD and just tried a fresh boot with both the SSD and the new HDD and it boots without any issues. I'll probably test if I can replicate the issue when connecting my old HDD, but I'll have to try that tomorrow as it only happens on fresh boots for me.

Could it be possible that the the old HDD has some old win system files laying around and that is causing the boot issue? I can't quite remember if I formatted the drive as this drive is now 5-6 years old and my skills were pretty limited back then to say the least lol, so that could be the case.

A mechanical hard disk needs more power than an SSD to initialise. If the power supply doesn't provide enough power it takes some time to initialise and be detected by the BIOS. You can try giving power from a different SATA power cable.