Windows 11 (and 10) slow boot on NVME drive

Hello everyone!

A friend of mine has been experiencing a rather annoying issue for over a year with his PC, both on Windows 10 and after upgrading to Windows 11. Everything works very well and fast but, when it boots up, it usually takes around 3 minutes, despite having an NVME drive. During the initial loading (where the logo with the loading wheel appears), it stays there for nearly 3 minutes. After that time, Windows starts immediately.

Important notes:

• All storage drives (NVME, 2 SSDs, and an HDD) work well and are in perfect health.
• I've tried booting the system with all USB devices disconnected, and it doesn't make any difference.
• Fast boot is disabled (powercfg -h off).
• After upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11, the problem disappeared for a few days and then came back to stay. I think this point could be an important clue to find the culprit.
• The motherboard is a Z370 SLI Plus.
• I've tried upgrading the BIOS. No luck.
• I've tried disabling system restore (this feature can get messed up and slow boot times). No changes.
• Reinstalling Windows is not an option at the moment.

This is the boot analysis file.

Thanks for the help!

Welcome to the forum.

Perform a clean boot to eliminate software conflict causing the issue. If it doesn't happen in a clean boot, you have some software conflicting with Windows. Brink's procedure will help you weed out which one. Perform a Clean Boot in Windows 11 to Troubleshoot Software Conflicts Tutorial

Make sure you have no corrupt system files that is causing this problem. Open a command prompt as administrator and type
sfc /scannow
Pay attention to the scan results to see if SFC found anything it could not repair. If it found corruption it could not fix followup with this command (note the spaces)
dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
Restart computer

See if the issue happens in safe mode. Boot to Safe Mode in Windows 11 Tutorial

Repair Install Windows 11 Repair Install Windows 11 with an In-place Upgrade Tutorial

S1L3nCe said:

All storage drives (NVME, 2 SSDs, and an HDD) work well and are in perfect health.....Reinstalling Windows is not an option at the moment.

Click to expand...

Exactly how did you test your drive health?

Never say never to reinstalling Windows. With some corruptions and failures, there's no way around it. One should always be prepared for such circumstances by making regular system images

open cmd (admin)
type:
bcdedit /enum firmware

and count the displayorder entries {IDs}
the first one should be
{bootmgr}
{ID}
. . .
{ID}

current NVMe firmware ?
cmd (admin)
wmic diskdrive get caption, firmwarerevision

edit:
1st check of your upload: don't play with the BCD

glasskuter said:

Perform a clean boot to eliminate software conflict causing the issue. If it doesn't happen in a clean boot, you have some software conflicting with Windows.

Click to expand...

I'll try that tomorrow, thanks

glasskuter said:

Exactly how did you test your drive health?

Never say never to reinstalling Windows. With some corruptions and failures, there's no way around it. One should always be prepared for such circumstances by making regular system images

Click to expand...

CrystalDiskmark and CrystalDiskInfo. No issues on any drive and transfer speeds are perfect. Like I said; in Windows everything runs smoothly.

As for reinstalling Windows, the option is there but I will try to avoid it if possible. Not just because of how time consuming it would be but because I would like to know what the hell is going on with the system to try to fix it without reinstalling.

POLYSIUS said:

open cmd (admin)
type:
bcdedit /enum firmware

and count the displayorder entries {IDs}
the first one should be
{bootmgr}
{ID}
. . .
{ID}

current NVMe firmware ?
cmd (admin)
wmic diskdrive get caption, firmwarerevision

edit:
1st check of your upload: don't play with the BCD

Click to expand...

I'll do that tomorrow too.

What do you mean by not playing with the BCD? I haven't done anything with the BCD.

Just boot normaly
Click on restart. Same problem?
Open TaskManager and select AutoStart
In the upper part on the right side you find the last BIOS-Time.
How many seconds did it take?

Usually you have 2 BCDs
A primary and a secondary
The primary is the one you see normally
The secondary is hidden and can be used by OEMs

What you uploaded looks like a secondary with this boot loader entry:

Bezeichner {default}
device ramdisk=[boot]\sources\boot.wim,{7619dcc8-fafe-11d9-b411-000476eba25f}
path \windows\system32\boot\winload.efi
description Minitool Boot Disk

You must have done s.th. that you didn't tell us!

Open notepad
in cmd (admin) you type
bcdedit /enum all

copy the complete output to notepad, save as BCD1.txt and upload.
complete means: starting and ending with C:\WINDOWS\system32>

POLYSIUS said:

You must have done s.th. that you didn't tell us!

Click to expand...

Maybe you are referring to this? I had that option on. Bear in mind that the slowness during boot has nothing to do with that option. I turned that on during testing to check the ntbtlog.txt.

S1L3nCe said:

Maybe you are referring to this?

Click to expand...

No, but I see that you are refering to s.th. that is useless to troubleshoot your boot problems.
I know how a ntbtlog.txt looks like.

Yes, I realised that after testing what it was. Then I came across the Windows Performance Recorder/Analyzer and I used that.

Other than that, I haven't change a thing. And my friend does not know rubbish, so I highly doubt he did anything.

S1L3nCe said:

During the initial loading (where the logo with the loading wheel appears), it stays there for nearly 3 minutes. After that time, Windows starts immediately.

Important notes:

• All storage drives (NVME, 2 SSDs, and an HDD) work well and are in perfect health.
• I've tried booting the system with all USB devices disconnected, and it doesn't make any difference.

Click to expand...

Try checking the SSDs and HDD to make sure no disk is marked as "active". You can do this from Disk Management. Only the NVME System Drive should be marked as "active".

30 days old is chopped liver?
here is first things first checks, on any old pc of any kind
smart data

if the HDD is failing for SMART data the HDD bad slows the whole PC down./
hdd always fail and they do so many a way but if lucky they get sick first (data can be had) and smart data shows the spare sectors are gone
that means it has bad sectors now.
run smart test app, even the free version of HW sentinel is great.

or remove all drives not the boot drive and see if it now boots fast.
make sure the boot drive passes the same tests just told above. on all drives for that matter.
do not allow bad sectors to happen after the automatic spare sectors are now gone. as they love to do old. (HDD self repair on the fly works until NOW)

do not lose data. post back of your checks all above fail. if yes try mine.
YMMV