boot recently went from 10 sec to 3 min

[percussionman11]

Little info about my computer setup in case it helps:
Case: Roswill Thor
Power Supply: Corsair 750W
OS:Windows 10
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z97X-SLI-CF
CPU: Intel Core i7 4790k
Memory: 16GB DDR3
Hard Drives: Samsung 850 PRO 256GB (OS is on this drive) + Kingston HyperX 120GB + 2 Western Digital 500GB HDD (old drives that I've just hung on to for mass storage)
Video Card: ASUS STRIX GTX 970 Overclocked
Monitors:
2 ASUS 24" and 1 Samsung 21.5"
Other Stuff: Oculus Rift


I am providing all that info in case it helps diagnose. Ultimately I'm having trouble with my boot as it went from a few mere seconds to get to my desktop to it randomly stalling at places during boot. Sometimes it hangs ("thinking wheel") during the BIOS/MOBO boot screen with a thinking wheel, sometimes it's during the windows password (I'll get part of the password in and then it freezes for several minutes before unfreezing), and sometimes it's when I'm at the desktop (the mouse moves but I can't click on anything, when it unfreezes it does everything I've done since it froze).

Any help in figuring out what is going on would be greatly appreciated. I can't tell you the exact date it started in relation to updates but it has been about a week I've noticed this. I see I have updates on 7/12 and 7/10 that were installed that include the following titles (not sure if it any of you know of a known conflict):

7/12 updates:
Security Update for Adobe Flash Player for Windows 10 Version 1511 for x64-based Systems (KB3174060)
Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool for Windows 8, 8.1, 10 and Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2 x64 Edition - July 2016 (KB890830)
Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 1511 for x64-based Systems (KB3172985)
Update for Windows 10 Version 1511 for x64-based Systems (KB3173428)

7/10 updates:
Security Update for Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package (KB2538243)
Update for Microsoft Silverlight (KB3162593)
Security Update for Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 4.0 (KB2993928)
Security Update for Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package (KB2538242)

 

[tehnokraat]

- Something is wrong. You may have any of the superior computer, however, it is not possible 10 seconds. This is wrong.
- Second. How can it be exactly three minutes, if you're talked about the 10 seconds which was before. Time must be in seconds also now. How is possible, exactly 3 minutes.
- Third. How the time was measured? How You did got this 3 minutes?
- Fourth. How the launching took place - was computer turned off or from sleep or from hibernation mode and both times was used the same way.
- Finally. Why is necessary for Microsoft Visual C ++ 2005 and are all drives active or some of them is/are logical?

 

[percussionman11]

...anybody else....I'm at a loss here.

 

[patonb]

Have you booted in safemode? See if its a windows loading issue.
Also boot with selective services loaded. Do a couple at a time to see if you can find what/if is it stalls..

 

[percussionman11]

Tried booting up in safe mode and
1) it was still slow
2) my keyboard didn't work anymore so I couldn't get past password screen

I also just tried unplugging all of the extra drives leaving only my one with Win10. No luck.

Next up is to start uninstalling stuff to see if I get lucky. Problem is the time it takes to boot makes this troubleshooting painfully slow...

Also, yesterday I went to look into uninstalling recent windows 10 updates and most couldn't be undone. I did uninstall the only one I could KB3172985 Security Update for Windows (I'm leaving this here partially for my record keeping)

 

[percussionman11]

Been sitting here trying to further test and have done the following:

- Uninstalled several unnecessary programs or recent programs.
- Disabled everything at startup in taskmanager
- Run Error Check and found a few things but it didn't speed things up

The thing that is weird is that where the system 'hangs up' is at random places. Sometimes it's during the bios screen (I get a thinking wheel spinning), sometimes it's in the password screen for windows (I go to type in my password and everything freezes), sometimes it is after I type my password (the thinking wheel) and sometimes it's after windows desktop comes up (I can't click anything but the mouse still moves).

Seems like something in the background is loading slow but I have nothing running at startup anymore. Again all windows updates are uninstalled that I can from recent weeks (all July).

I'm at a point where I don't know what else to try other than reformatting and I REALLY don't want to do that, any other suggestions?

 

[patonb]

Have you tried booting to a live Linux disk/usb drive.

Since you can't rule out hardware this might be an option.

You could make a backup of your windows install before you have to reformat, this way if it isn't fixed by reinstalling, you can just plop it back on.

 

[luke127]

Tbh, easiest thing when this happens, nuke it and go again. If there's any files you need to keep, then do what paton said and boot into linux, copy those files to a USB or external HDD, then just reinstall windows 10 fresh. If the problem persists, then you're looking at a hardware problem, not a software one.

Edit: Just read the above post, um, why don't you want to reformat?

 

[percussionman11]

So apparently one of things I did worked since my computer now boots back up again in about 10 seconds. In an attempt to figure out what it was I tried slowly turning back on the startup processes and turned them all on with no problems.

Not 100% sure what it was but good news is it all works again. Thanks for the ideas/suggestions.

Also, the reason I didn't want to reformat is simply the time it takes. Especially since I only built this computer about 6 months ago. Regardless, thanks again everyone!