Solved Very slow cold boot, driver loading problems

Hi

So I used the "auto-update" tool from amd to update every amd related driver on my 5900HX laptop. I kept downloading the latest version of the Adrenaline drivers and it was telling me it wasn't compatible, I didn't realize at the time they dropped support for GCN/Vega already so I thought I'd try updating with this tool instead.

I updated everything using that tool, everything is fine except booting up from cold now takes almost 2 full minutes when it was maybe 20 seconds at most before (loading animation screen). I enabled boot logging and there seems to be loops where windows is trying to load the same drivers and failing over and over again (example in the screenshot. It looks like 70-80% of the log file is BOOTLOG_NOT_LOADED). I googled a bit and decided to try windows' own verifier tool to try and fix the problem. After selecting all drivers to be checked and restarting, verifier keeps causing "system_thread_exception_not_handled" BSODs every time. To get into windows again I had to do verifier /reset and cancel the driver verification.

How do I proceed here? I'd rather not go through a fresh windows installation if possible.
Any help is appreciated.

Thanks.

Hi, @gwyn58, and welcome to Eleven Forums (11F for short).

Have you checked to see if you have a System Restore point from just before or right at when the issue started? Rolling back via System Restore doesn't alter data files, but is a good way to revert drivers that may be causing conflicts.

Take a look at this tutorial to see your available SR points: See List of Available Restore Points in Windows 11 Tutorial

And if you find one you want to give a shot, use this tutorial to restore it: Use System Restore in Windows 11 Tutorial

johnlgalt said:

Hi, @gwyn58, and welcome to Eleven Forums (11F for short).

Have you checked to see if you have a System Restore point from just before or right at when the issue started? Rolling back via System Restore doesn't alter data files, but is a good way to revert drivers that may be causing conflicts.

Take a look at this tutorial to see your available SR points: See List of Available Restore Points in Windows 11 Tutorial

And if you find one you want to give a shot, use this tutorial to restore it: Use System Restore in Windows 11 Tutorial

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. I have the (bad?) habit of always cleaning out restore points with the clean up tool. So I can't perform a windows restore.

Although I'm able to boot just fine now as I stated in the original post. It's just that booting up takes a long time still and I don't know how to get windows to not go into a loop of trying to load the same drivers and failing over and over for about 2 minutes.

I was able to fix the issue by simply completely removing the graphics drivers (not chipset drivers) using the amd cleanup utility, installing the minimal graphics drivers provided by ASUS for the laptop because I tried reinstalling only the graphics drivers using the auto-detect tool and I had the same problem resurface.

Now the windows loading animation takes maybe 12 seconds max and I'm at the login screen as usual. The bootlog looks fine as well. Everything works as it should. The whole driver verifier thing was unnecessary. I haven't tried the latest graphics drivers from amd yet (offline installation, not with the auto-detect tool) but I'm just gonna leave it like this with the latest OEM drivers dating back to march of this year. I tested the iGPU performance using aida64's GPGPU benchmark and it's exactly the same as it was before. I don't think there's any need to upgrade, especially knowing they dropped support for GCN/Vega.

Glad you got it working!

Sounds like there is a compatibility issue between your GPU and the newer drivers from AMD, and I've seen other (primarily older, now that I think about it) laptops that had to / could only use the GPU drivers from the OEM, not the general packages available to to download for everyone, even if you pick the correct version applicable to your specific GPU family. But it has been so long since I've had to deal with it, it was relegated to the far reaches of my mind. Out of sight, etc.

At least now you have a solid core idea on what the issue was, and can make a system image to make restoration easy, if you feel like testing it some more.

I was facing a similar issue and managed to resolve it so maybe my solution helps others also.

The device is a (Medion) notebook with a Ryzen 5 3500U/Radeon Vega 8 graphics integration.


Issue;
All works fine when I (re)install W11 (pro) but after I install the AMD driver package and reboot, I have to wait for minutes to get to the Windows login screen. After this delay, everything seems to work normally.
But that delay is a dealbeaker.

Solution;
After some old fashioned Googling, I see that 'it' could be fixed by disabling; listed in the 'device properties' overview under the section 'system devices';
--> AMD Audio CoProcessor
As this fixed the bootdelay I went for an alternative, which is just upgrading the driver manually, instead of having to disable it.
To do so I grabbed a more recent package from Dell (Dutch page but you will manage) -> AMD-Audio-CoProcesser-Driver_R6WFX_WIN64_6.0.0.46_A00.EXE

When you install this package you need to reinstall (repair) the initial AMD software again to regain the control center etc.
By now the upgraded driver for the AMD Audio CoProcessor is available to be selected when you manually choose to upgrade the driver (via device manager) from 2.89.0.61 (bad) to 6.0.0.46 (good).

As this fixed it for me I did not care to look for other driver version to upgrade to, so feel free to pick an alternative.
Screenshot added below for clarification.