Windows 10 won't boot

Hey,
I picked up a new rig just two days ago, threw Windows on an SSD, and man, it was a total nightmare. It took like 10 minutes just to boot up. So, I did a fresh install of Windows, and it actually booted normally in seconds the first time—but now? Now it’s back to taking 10 minutes again. Everything is brand new, so I have zero clue what's going on here.
Any advice? Please help me out.

Make sure you check whether Windows is running updates in the background

It’s not working. My last update attempt is already dragging on for over half an hour now.
Since I only have Windows installed on this SSD and nothing else on my rig, I’m pretty sure the issue lies right there.
I'm talking about this specific drive here:
https://www.amazon.com/GIGABYTE-PCIe-NVMe-M.2-SSD/dp/B08X6S9K9V

I was just wondering, did you happen to double-check all those settings in the BIOS?

I didn't touch a single thing in the BIOS. Honestly, the guys at Best Buy just built the rig for me, then I got home, installed Windows, and called it a day.

vividbison47 said:I didn't touch a single thing in the BIOS. Honestly, the guys at Best Buy just built the rig for me, then I got home, installed Windows, and called it a day.

But honestly, who really knows exactly how they configured everything in there? 🤔

Maybe you should double-check your BIOS settings just to be safe—specifically, see if it's set to UEFI and if your drive is running in AHCI mode.

It might also be worth looking into your power states; I'd suggest turning off any power-saving features to see if that helps.

If nothing seems to work, you could try enabling the option to generate a boot log in Windows, because who knows, maybe you'll find a clue buried in those logs.

UEFI works fine with an SSD on AHCI too,

Any idea how I can check the power status and power saving settings? Like, what’s the actual point of those anyway?

If you just unchecked the auto-install option and finished the setup, but the SSD still won't boot up in under five seconds? Honestly, you might as well just return it already.
Sometimes you just get stuck with a dud component, you know?
A six-month-old used rig is always going to be more reliable than something straight out of the box.

Ran CrystalDiskInfo on it and everything looks solid

You might want to look through your BIOS settings for a Fast Boot option—maybe try toggling that on or off to see if it makes a difference.

If you head over to the Windows Control Panel, you can adjust your power settings; I’d suggest switching to the High Performance profile. There's actually a Fast Startup setting in there too, so it might be worth experimenting with that as well.

It really is probably best to manually install the chipset drivers for your motherboard, even though Windows usually tries to handle those automatically.

And honestly, make sure you grab the official network drivers too.

I’d also recommend disconnecting any mapped network drives during the boot process and unplugging unnecessary USB devices, just because those can sometimes cause all sorts of headaches.

Once everything finally gets up and running, it would be a good idea to check your disk transfer speeds, both for reading from and writing to the drive.

Maybe take a peek at the Event Viewer to see if there are any error alerts popping up?

There's also some performance monitoring stuff located within the Administrative Tools; you could check that out to see if it throws any specific warnings.

It might help to enable boot logging as well.

You should definitely check out this link:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...d-4216385c7ff3

Perhaps you could download the Performance Recorder and run a full log of everything happening on the system.

🤔

I guess I'm running out of ideas at this point, haha! 😁

I don't quite have the time to sit down and write out a full step-by-step tutorial for you, but if you search online, I'm sure you'll find plenty of helpful guides.

vividbison47 said:Hey,
I picked up a new rig just two days ago, threw Windows on an SSD, and man, it was a total nightmare. It took like 10 minutes just to boot up. So, I did a fresh install of Windows, and it actually booted normally in seconds the first time—but now? Now it’s back to taking 10 minutes again. Everything is brand new, so I have zero clue what's going on here.
Any advice? Please help me out.

https://osdn.net/projects/crystaldis...ark7_0_0f.exe/

Go ahead and grab CrystalDiskMark—just download it and run a quick test. It'll show you if your SSD speeds are actually hitting what the box promised. If they're way lower than expected, you might be looking at a hardware defect... which would be a bummer. Also, maybe try swapping out the SATA cable? Sometimes it’s just a faulty cable causing all the headaches.

Turns out I actually had to unplug my hard drive before installing Windows on the SSD—had zero clue about that, total rookie mistake. Everything is running smooth as silk now.
Thanks for the help regardless.

vividbison47 said:Turns out I actually had to unplug my hard drive before installing Windows on the SSD—had zero clue about that, total rookie mistake. Everything is running smooth as silk now.
Thanks for the help regardless.

I’ve gone years using an SSD paired with a 1TB hard drive, and whenever I installed Windows, I’d just select the SSD partition and call it a day—never ran into any issues. But hey, the main thing is that it's working now... anyway, go ahead and run that program I linked for you earlier.

I had the same thing happen when I was installing win. I was dead set on putting it on my SSD, but for some reason, the system just kept fighting me on it.

As long as those read and write speeds are hitting what they're supposed to, you're golden—they aren't any slower than what the box says.