Win 11 won't boot after restart but boots fine after shutdown

Hi, new to the group. My Win 11 desktop will not boot after a restart, but boots up fine after a shutdown. Any ideas as to why? Thanks...Randy

Welcome to ElevenForum!

Could you describe what happens after a restart in a little more detail? What do you observe? Does it look at all as if you are getting to the point where the system is starting up again or does it never even get to the point of restarting? Are you seeing an messages?

Any other details that you can think of would be appreciated.

Disable fast startup to see it will resolve the problem.

hsehestedt said:

Welcome to ElevenForum!

Could you describe what happens after a restart in a little more detail? What do you observe? Does it look at all as if you are getting to the point where the system is starting up again or does it never even get to the point of restarting? Are you seeing an messages?

Any other details that you can think of would be appreciated.

Click to expand...

I get the "restarting" logo and then just a black screen. I went into bios and cannot find an option to disable fast boot. MSI B650 Pro-Wifi MB. The restart function was working at one time. I don't know what happened to make it stop.

randyr5 said:

I get the "restarting" logo and then just a black screen. I went into bios and cannot find an option to disable fast boot. MSI B650 Pro-Wifi MB. The restart function was working at one time. I don't know what happened to make it stop.

Click to expand...

Click on the link that @FreeBooter posted. You need to try turning off Fast Startup in Windows.

Please comment on FreeBooter's suggestion in post #3.

An alternative is testing administrative command prompt: powercfg -h off

Not to hijack your thread but contribute to it. I, too, am a victim of what I believe to be the explorer bug mentioned
HERE that Microsoft admits but has not officially addressed.
See the part that says "

Explorer.exe is still crashing for some people​

A bug that crashes explorer.exe when rebooting Windows was first reported in KB5034204 (January 2024 Update) and is still present in the February 2024 optional update.

Is this what you are experiencing? This is also happening to me at times.

1. Occasionally, during normal operation explorer will hang when I'm doing random tasks and I have to force restart explorer. I do not remember what build I was on when this started but I believe it was with after 23h2. I restored back to my last image of 22h2 and ran for 2 weeks with no problems. I then restored back to my first image of 23h2 which worked but issues began after the first cumulative was applied...again happening randomly.

2, When I use restart from power menu, restart process will begin but just hang in restarting state with black screen with no indication on screen of apps that are preventing restart. There is no option to "restart anyway". This forces me to do a hard shutdown. Shutdown is not affected by this. This may happen several times a week or may go weeks without happening. I have found that if I restart explorer just before restart, restart will always work.


3. I have done all troubleshooting I can think of up to to but not including a repair install. SFC, DISM restore health, power options to default, fast startup off, safe mode, disabled startup apps. Because it is so random, clean boot has not been of benefit in a resolution.

I restart so seldom, I've lived with the killing explorer workaround before restart or using shutdown for now. I hesitated doing a repair install after reading that it was a known problem for some.

FreeBooter said:

Disable fast startup to see it will resolve the problem.

Turn On or Off Fast Startup in Windows 11 Tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to turn on or off fast startup in Windows 11. There are three startup modes in Windows: Cold (traditional) Wake-from-hibernation Fast Starting with Windows 8.x, the default shutdown and restart scenario has been updated and named fast startup. Fast startup...

www.elevenforum.com

Click to expand...

I initially considered fast startup as well, but fast startup only affects the behavior of the system after a shutdown, not a restart. In this case the problem as stated is with a restart, not after a shutdown.

zbook said:

Please comment on FreeBooter's suggestion in post #3.

An alternative is testing administrative command prompt: powercfg -h off

Click to expand...

Disabling fast startup did not change anything. This MSI MB has what are called "EZ DeBug" LED's and the "DRAM not detected or fail" light remains lit, but only on a restart. Boots fine after a shutdown. I've tried 2 different brands of RAM, both on MSI's "approved" list. I'm thinking of loading the BIOS defaults, even though I didn't change much at all.

I'm wondering if a driver isn't stopping or a background service or apps isn't closing and causing the problem. What happens if you hold the shift key when hitting restart.

Do the Windows Event Logs shed any light on this?

My suggestion would be to perform a restart once again, noting the time at which you do so. Then, once back in Windows, check the events starting from that time.

randyr5 said:

I get the "restarting" logo and then just a black screen. I went into bios and cannot find an option to disable fast boot. MSI B650 Pro-Wifi MB. The restart function was working at one time. I don't know what happened to make it stop.

Click to expand...

Turn on verbose logging to see where it hangs....

This works in 10, should work in 11:

1. Start > Run > Type regedit and select from the list.
2. Find the key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
3. Right-click under that and create a New > DWORD Value.
4. Type VerboseStatus and double-click that new key, giving it the value data set to 1.

Next time you reboot/shutdown (if you can), see if windows will now give you verbose startup, shutdown, logon, and logoff status messages.

I was describing this issue to a friend and I guess the process of discussing it out loud made me look at this from a different angle.

Here is what I want to know:

If you boot the system into safe mode and then perform a restart, will the system restart successfully?