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.

Click to expand...

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.

hi guys,

so i've been lead here by google search and i've been having the exact same problem... super stable and fine once i've booted into windows - even doing video editing and AAA games. BUT intermittent freezes on boot up. for me, it's more like every other boot rather than the once or twice a week for ultragravy.

and it's the combination of those factors that are so vexing. if something really was wrong hardware-wise, it would seem i'd have a problem doing the computationally intensive things that i do after bootup. but nope... just on boot.

i'm of the opinion that it might be due to the USB devices. i've noticed that between all the things i have plugged in, occasionally, one device or another wouldn't be available when i needed it (so a camera would be out or the flight stick would be not recognized) needing me to unplug it and replug it... so generally, i have a poor opinion of USB as it's always been a system that's been prone to issues for me... it's not "rock solid".

ultragravy, have you indeed just tried pulling all the usb devices and tried turning the computer on that way? so no mouse, no keyboard, no nothing?

i ask because you only seem to have a few usb devices attached and if that solves the problem, i think we have our answer. i'm hesitant to do this because i have a CRAPLOAD of usb devices attached and i don't want win 10 to just freak out because all devices went missing and then appeared between boots. as i said, i am distrustful of the whole usb situation to begin with.

but if it's just usb enumeration or whatever failing every once in a while on boot, i can totally live with that.

thanks much fellows.

If you have USB issues, you can try adding a dedicated USB card and use these ports instead. Also try updating your chipset and USB drivers if applicable.

So as a bit of an update here, and partially in response to minimax, there's been a few developments for me.

I havent truly fixed the problem, but a few changes I've made have vastly lessened it and I've been monitoring it more and got some interesting results.

Firstly, swapping my monitor from using a DP cable to an HDMI cable had a big impact in making the failures go from once every 2-3 days to maybe once a fortnight. It still does it, but FAR less after the HDMI cable swap. Monitor itself is the same.

Secondly, after the patches a month or so ago where they did lots of updates to Windows Defender (it was constantly showing a ! mark for people due to issues with the kernel protection) that also lessened it. Now since those big updates my windows I've had a grand total of TWO failed boots... and both of them were one day after a big Windows Cumulative update. As in, the update happened, i did the forced reboot to install the update, it booted in fine with no issues. Then the day AFTER that, the morning boot failed. Then no issues for 2 weeks after that. I'm very un-techy but that just implies the cumulative update changed some kind of driver/boot setting after it was fully installed, which then was corrected after failed boot?

Thirdly, I liaised a lot with another user on here and I believe the boot hanging on a spinning dots is not a FREEZE, its a delay. That is, the boot is still going, and if you leave the pc for 45+ minutes, it eventually boots into Windows. We found some old MS forum posts about this issue but it was inconclusive, it seemed to imply something to do with some bug regarding the event logger.

Therefore, whilst I'm still completely unsure what has been causing my issue, I'm 95% convinced its some kind of weird Driver or Service issue rather than a hardware failure, as the failed boots have coincided somewhat with thigns like graphic driver changes, cumulative updates, and just randomness. It may indeed still be due to some kind of USB power/initialisation problem, but it feels like there are other factors involved that make Windows more "resilient" to the USB issue so that it it only fails to boot due to the USB issue -sometimes-.

Also I should mention that the user I was liaising with (heax above) managed to fix their issue due to swapping out an old HDD drive I believe. Something about the drive itself was causing the issue. Again, may be power related and USB initialisation related due to the HDD taking more power. For me though it's been impossible to test this fail via USB devices. I've swapped out every USB device i have (mouse, keyboard, microphone) and the fault has happened regardless so it's not related to a specific single device. And I cant easily test if it fails boot without ANY USB devices plugged in because most days it boots fine, so it would take probably 2-3 weeks of daily boots with no devices in it to see if i ever get a failed boot and that isnt really practical. If it was 100% failure rate every day it would be easy to test!

@minimax, Is it always the same USB ports that the devices stop working on or is it any port they are plugged into? If it's on any port maybe they're not getting enough power. If it's always the same USB ports it could be a problem with the onboard ports. If you can, try using a powered USB hub connect to a known good USB port on your computer.

thanks ultragravy and everyone,

huh. actually, a little update on my situation - i seemed to have resolved the issue (fingers crossed).

so first trip was to the bios/uefi to get rid of the fullscreen splash on boot. i have an MSI X99A SLI PLUS mobo and with that turned on, i get a very nice hires MSI logo where the spinning circles show up before i hit windows. but since that's where i was getting stuck, i turned that off to see if the POST details were showing anything of interest.

while i was in the settings tho, i noticed that a setting for FAST BOOT was turned on.

i remember a while back i turned off fast boot in windows because that windows feature prevents a full refresh of the system on boot ups and only really does a clean boot on restarts.

at the same time, i may have been doodling around in the bios and turned off MSI FAST BOOT. however, on this mobo, when you disable MSI FAST BOOT, there is a greyed out feature that becomes non greyed out called FAST BOOT which apparently hooks up with a feature in windows 8/8.1 or something.


i'm not sure but that might have been when i started getting hangs on boot.

==========

this time around, i did a little more research and discovered that these features are NOT related to the in windows fast boot feature (ugh).... they basically just allow boot before all devices are accounted for... which actually kind of sounds like what i would WANT.... just boot into windows with the minimal account of hardware possible.

so actually, what i did was turn MSI FAST BOOT back ON and left the full screen splashscreen off as well.

and since then...

no hangs on boot!

my plan was that if MSI FAST BOOT started causing hangs too, i'd just turn off all FAST BOOT features in bios.... but it seems that my system only had an issue with the FAST BOOT feature that interfaces with win 8.

anyway, that was my journey.

but thanks for all the ideas and help!

minimax

P.S. Winuser - i've upgraded systems from a pentium II 450 with a TNT2 graphics card and i've AAAAAAALLLLLLLLLWWWWWAAAAAAYYYYYYYSSSS had problems with USB not being 100%. not critical things... but just not showing up from time to time. they always flake out SOMEWHERE. and that's true even for systems at work. so for me, it's kind of become one of those things that i just chalk up to the unreliability of USB.