Intermittent boot problem - stuck at spinning dots (sometimes)

If the power supply or other parts are still under Warranty I would have the computer checked and replace it as needed. If for example it doesn't give accurate voltages (3.3V, 5V, 12V lines) the RAM or the graphics card would malfunction and hence the freezes. At next attempt the voltages are closer to the correct values and the system boots. At Service they can check the power supply with a tester, they can check RAM for errors with a utility such as Memtest, they can check the whole hardware using a utility such as Burnin Test, the hard drive with Hard Disk Sentinel etc. You could download these tools and check for yourself before leaving it at the Service. Also it doesn't harm to update all your drivers to eliminate the possibility of a faulty driver freezing the system at startup. Download the graphics drivers directly from nVidia, don't rely on Windows Update. I would even try a different output for the monitor. Try another HDMI or Display Port.

My symptoms were exactly same as yours, would boot fine for days then spinning circle no boot, restart and all fine. Never had issue again since setting to single monitor.

Bringing this back up as after 6 months of trial and testing it still hasnt resolved. Symptoms are the same - roughly once every 4-5 days the PC doesnt boot, but a power off/on makes it boot absolutely fine and it behaves great. I'm still of the belief that it's unlikely a hardware fault given how efficient and crash-free the PC has been whilst constantly running games for hours daily, but right now I'm mostly after some confirmation on exactly what the symptoms mean:

I've checked windows event logs but all I can see is a single info event saying that shutdown status was false on the days it happens, so Windows realise it didnt boot but otherwise logs nothing.

For reference, this is what my boot sequence looks like when I power up my PC for the first time each morning:

• Case RGB + Keyboard lights come on. Fan spinup for 3-4 secs.
• Monitor comes on. Bios Logo appears.
• Mouse + Mic lights come on.
• Mouse + Mic lights go off. Spinning Circles appear on boot screen.
• Mouse + Mic lights come back on. (PC always reaches this point in boot sequence. Friend said this means BIOS has loaded fine and it's found the Win11 OS and is now using the Win11 USB controller and is loading devices via Windows?)
• If it works, the Spinning Circles pause briefly and it bounces to the Windows login splash. All good. Machine runs brilliantly.
• If it FAILS though the circles keep spinning forever, the Mouse Light goes out, but the Mic light stays lit. This is where I need to power off the PC, and so far it then 100% boots fine afterwards.

I'd love some education on EXACTLY what it means when the spinning circles just keep going on boot. No errors are throwing up, they keep spinning and nothing beeps or freezes. The only problems I can find online regarding boot fails at permanently spinning circles imply a failed hardware and the hardware needs to be removed to fix, but this problem is fixed by just a quick power off, and then the PC works flawlessly. As said, as it's currently not a major inconvenience I'd rather not go down the route of replacing any hardware until I've exhausted all easy software/driver type issues (particularly as Garrett above said he had the same symptoms and it was fixed via a windows display setting change).

Was what my friend said correct about the USB controller? He said that the BIOS uses a USB controller on powerup to get your devices working, then once BIOS has booted, it finds the OS, and then "hands over" control of the USB to the OS drivers, which is why the mouse/keyboard/mic come on early in bootup, then go off again, but then come on again at the end when Windows takes over? If it's getting to this point every time, does that imply the BIOS and hardware is fine but Windows drivers are an issue?

Any comments or help to understand what's happening would be great!

Do you have any external USB devices connected?

kelper said:

Do you have any external USB devices connected?

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The only USB devices I have are my mouse (logitech G203), my keyboard, and a desktop mic, but the mic was bought a couple of months after I got the PC and the issue was happening before I got it so I pretty much ruled that out. When the spinning dots keep going when it fails, my mouse light goes out but the mic light stays on, so it hasnt turned off all the USB devices. Could it simply be a weird mouse issue causing it?

(I assume you meant external usb storage devices? In which case, no, i did use one once for some file transfers from my old PC but havent since).

What confused me was how a simple power off/on fixes the issue every time. No need to actually change any settings anywhere. Curious what the difference is in the actual startup sequence that makes this happen.

I have 3 SSDs in the machine, one bootable and two storage/games ones. Am I right that the point at which the boot sequence reaches that the bios has successfully located Windows as the OS on that disc and is starting to load it and its the windows loading that's failing, rather than the bios itself before any OS is found?

just try unplugging all those usb things and see what happens.

I guess a device (either internal or USB) is not powered properly and doesn't initialize. Windows wait for report from this device before proceeding and hence it stuck at the spinning dots. Once power is recycled (off and back on), the device initializes properly and Windows load. For internal devices, I would try another power cable (different SATA or PCIE power cable). For USB devices, I would try connecting to a different USB port. I would connect faster and more power demanding devices at the USB ports at the motherboard near the LAN port and the rest devices at the remaining ports. I had a similar issue with my old power supply. One DVD drive would get stuck and I had to remove the power cable and reconnect it before I could boot into Windows.

Thank you for the suggestions - I noticed that my Mouse and Keyboard were both plugged into the USB 2.0 ports at the far edge of the motherboard. The USB ports nearest the LAN connector were all USB Superspeed, but after your post Spapakons I read up a bit and seems there is definitely an "extra layer" of comms between the USB 2.0.

I've swapped both mouse and keyboard into two of the USB superspeed slots nearest to the LAN port. As always with this problem I wont know if it's fixed or not until the boot fail happens, so even if this didn't fix it I wont know until after 1-2 weeks of zero problems, but I'll see how this goes. What you describe certainly makes sense.

When the spinning circles keep going on a boot fail, the mouse loses power and this is what tells me the boot has failed. However, I'd originally thought this was just a failed boot powering down the USB but it seems my Mic light stays on, so could this represent what you say - the mouse being connected to the far USB 2.0 connector is failing sometimes to communicate back to windows after cold boots and windows ends up effectively turning it off/depowering it?

I know very little about USB controllers but your post does seem to tick a lot of boxes, fingers crossed this change does something!

If it still fails booting again in the coming week I'll probably try swapping out the mouse and keyboard entirely for two new models to make sure it's just not a slightly dodgy device. If that doesnt work I guess I can rule out USB devices/ports and reading your post I should look at my hard drives. I have three SSDs so whilst it's clearly having no issue finding the main drive with windows on I guess it could be a problem with failing to initialise one of the two storage SSDs on cold boots?

UPDATE - so my keyboard is being rather weird. If I plug the keyboard into one of the USB superspeed ports near the LAN then it does not register on boot up (the mouse works fine in it). If I unplug the keyboard and plug it back into the USB port when I'm on the windows login screen then windows finds it and it works. It clearly isnt finding the keyboard in the bios bootup as although the RGB lights are on it does not turn on the caps lock light when the other USB devices load.

Confirmed that if i swap my keyboard back over to the old USB 2.0 slots everything boots fine. I guess I'll run the test week with the keyboard in the old USB 2.0 and the mouse now swapped to the USB superspeed near the LAN port and see what happens. If this doesnt fix it I think my keyboard might be the first piece of kit to get swapped out as surely it shouldn't fail to be seen in a USB superspeed until i unplug and replug it when windows has loaded?

This may be entirely unrelated to the issue, but is there a known issue with some keyboards being a bit flakey in USB superspeed ports?

"Legacy" USB devices such as your keyboard may not work properly outside Windows if you connect them to a USB 3.0 or faster port. I always connect a simple keyboard and standard mouse on the USB 2.0 ports to make sure I won't have any compatibility issues. I reserve the faster ports for devices that will make a difference in performance, such as a USB 3.0 flash drive or hard disk. I recently confirmed that my external UHD Blu Ray drive has no problem reading a DVD or standard Blu Ray discs in USB 2.0 it can even read the contents of a UHD 4K Blu Ray disc, but in order to actually play a 4K disc I must connect it to a USB 3.0 port to get the appropriate power and speed.

Hi! I have the exact same issue. Stuck on the spinning dots screen. If keyboard rgb goes off, I know for a fact it will 100% not boot that time. I've done the usual sfc and dism checks, plugged both keyboard and mouse into USB2.0 ports, checked for ram failure, stress tested gpu and cpu to see if it would crash...

I've also performed multiple windows reinstalls (I kept files, so it's not a full fresh install, might wanna try that).
Only thing left to try for me is clearing CMOS and updating BIOS to latest version, though I doubt that will fix the issue.

No performance issues at all, during gaming, rendering.... everything runs as it should and is very stable (never crashed with this build)

One thing I've noticed is that if it goes into automatic repair screen (on 3rd forced reboot) and I exit to boot the OS, it boots just fine. Just like OP, if I restart, shutdown, it will boot just fine. Issue comes when I shutdown and boot up the following day or in a couple hours time, really weird. I can't reproduce the issue either if I disconnect PSU, will just randomly occur.



If anyone knows any other possible fix to this I'd love to know, I'm fed up of force shutting down my PC 3 times whenever I actually want to use it.

My specs for reference:
Win 10 22H2 64bit 19045.2604
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (no OC)
32gb 3600mhz ram
B550m Aorus Elite
RTX3070 (no OC)
A400 SSD (OS)
2TB HDD, Files, Desktop, Downloads...
1TB HDD, extra files

Try a powered USB hub.

Or run Ubuntu from a thumb drive and see if it has the same issues.

kelper said:

Try a powered USB hub.

Or run Ubuntu from a thumb drive and see if it has the same issues.

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Can't reproduce the issue now. I'll keep the bootable USB in and I'll try to see whether it happens on ubuntu after a failed boot (I get 2 failed boots and 3rd one boots fine after troubleshoot screen). I'll report back when I have something.

It is more likely a lack of power when it happens. Some line of the PSU (3.3V or 5V or 12V or their negative) either isn't accurate or doesn't provide enough mA for all devices. I would replace the PSU.

spapakons said:

It is more likely a lack of power when it happens. Some line of the PSU (3.3V or 5V or 12V or their negative) either isn't accurate or doesn't provide enough mA for all devices. I would replace the PSU.

Click to expand...

Any way to test this? PSU is pretty new and this shouldn't happen at all specially because everything that's plugged in in my case is a mouse and keyboard.

There are devices called PSU testers. You connect the 24-pin cable, the 4-pin power, one SATA power, one molex (IDE power, optional), one floppy power (optional) and one 6-pin PCIe power cable on the tester. Then you connect the mains power cord and switch on the PSU. The tester should switch on and indicate the voltage values where you can see if any value is too far from the nominal (such as 3V instead of 3.3V, 12.3V instead of 12V etc). Some testers may also display mA or A values where you can see if they are lower than the advertised values in the PSU specs.

spapakons said:

There are devices called PSU testers. You connect the 24-pin cable, the 4-pin power, one SATA power, one molex (IDE power, optional), one floppy power (optional) and one 6-pin PCIe power cable on the tester. Then you connect the mains power cord and switch on the PSU. The tester should switch on and indicate the voltage values where you can see if any value is too far from the nominal (such as 3V instead of 3.3V, 12.3V instead of 12V etc). Some testers may also display mA or A values where you can see if they are lower than the advertised values in the PSU specs.

Click to expand...

Good to know, if I don't get this fixed, I'll probably try that and see whether the psu is faulty. Right now I can't get the boot to fail so can't really test any other fixes. It's so weird that the issue doesn't always occur even after disconnecting from the power outlet :/

It is very unlikely to be the PSU. Try other suggestions first.

Just tried it with ubuntu:
First boot of the day, got infinite boot (keyboard rgb off). Force shutdown, booted into Ubuntu through a bootable USB, no issues at all, very fast boot. Second boot is almost always also a failed boot (3rd boot attempt gets me into windows just fine).
Will probably try updating BIOS, though I'm pretty confident it won't really fix much.

Updated the BIOS. Will report back probably tomorrow, when I do a "fresh" boot that should be problematic if the issue isn't fixed