Windows 10 occasional startup glitch. Maybe a multiboot problem.

Steve17

Active Member
When installing Windows 10 and I don't unplug my other drives first (which have Windows 7 installed), does the Windows 10 installation do something different (and disgusting IMHO) for the sake of the equally disgusting fast startup, that it wouldn't do if I had remembered to unplug the other drives first?

I do disable hibernation the first time I run Windows 10.

The reason I ask is because I did install Windows 10 on another computer that had Windows 7 drives. But that time I remembered to unplug the other drives first. I have no problems with that computer.

By the way, all my hard drives are bootable and I can load and run any Windows installation no matter which drive I boot from. Thanks EasyBCD! :smile:

95% of the time everything works on my problematic computer like it should. But 5% of the time, Windows 10 gets stuck, apparently just before it should give me the login screen. I see the windows logo above the 5 white balls chasing themselves around a circle, then the screen turns black. So far it looks normal. But then it goes back to the previous screen with the logo and balls going around a circle. It stays there forever. I need to reset or power off my computer. If I then boot up and run Windows 10, it works fine.

I haven't been able to nail down what triggers this hang.

Today it happened at the scariest time. Win10 pulled down a bunch of updates that required a restart. I restarted and got the hang. I cycled power and it came back up running, and finished the update install, as if nothing had happened.

I'm thinking maybe I should reinstall. My boot files are on separate small partitions. Maybe I should somehow reinstall that.
 
Thanks for the reply. I don't think I got an e-mail notifying me of a reply.

I disable hibernate with the "powercfg -h off" command. This seems to remove all mention of "fast start" from the control panel power options windows.

I'm still wondering when I am about to install Win10 on a drive by itself, and there are other drives with Win7, should I unplug the Win7 drives during the installation, or doesn't it make any difference?

I've learned something curious about this hang. I can cause it every time, from the "Startup settings" screen. During startup, I hit F8 when on the OS selection menu. This gives me the "Startup settings" screen. Item 2 is "Enable boot logging". If I select that, Win10 hangs every time with identical symptoms to the seemingly random hang I described in my first post.

P.S. The Win10 drive is SSD. The Win7 drives are not. The Win10 drive is the default boot drive.
 
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Did you follow the instructions ?
fast start is hidden away, and MS pretends it's nothing to do with hibernate.
 
"I think I did follow instructions for Win10. No mention of fast start. There is no hiberfil.sys on my C drive either. No problem running Win7 after running Win10.

I think my problem lies elsewhere. Maybe an incompatible driver. As this is an in-place upgrade from Win7, that could be a problem. I also noticed errors in Windows/Logs/CBS. Now that I can cause the problem every time by using "Enable boot logging" in "Startup settings", I may be able to figure it out, or report it to Microsoft. I don't have this problem on an older computer with similar Win7 drives where I installed Win10 on a separate SSD using the same method except I unplugged the Win7 drives when I installed Win10.

Apparently I can get this problem after a restart so no "shutdown" is involved in that case.

There is 60GB unused on the Win10 SSD, which should be enough to try a clean install and see if that has the problem.

Thanks for your help in any case.

Here is what the Power Options > "Show hidden settings" looks like.

upload_2016-4-19_9-32-20.png
 
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Just dual boot Windows 7 and Windows 10 with the former as your primary OS. That way you can mess around with Windows 10 until they get all the bugs out or you decide that it isn't for you.
 
Thanks for all the encouragement and advice. Don't worry about me. I've been playing with Windows for almost 20 years. Notice I made sure I still have Win7 after installing Win10.

Viva la EasyBCD!
 
Me too, hanging on to my 7 as long as possible. I keep the 2 10 installations just to keep in practice at swearing...not really, but almost LOL.
 
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