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[Biowraith]

I figure this could potentially end up with enough conversation that it'd clog the generic computer thread, though I'm mostly just posting to see if there's an immediate and obvious explanation before I start delving into dedicated tech support sites or swapping out components etc.

So, over the past month I have had 5 occasions where on turning my PC on it goes through the normal bios post process with no apparent issues, but when it gets to the Windows 10 loading screen it appears to get 'stuck' - it sits there with no spinning white dots, no disk activity, and the caps/num/scroll lock keys no longer toggle the related keyboard LEDs.  Normally it only sits at the windows loading screen for a second before it transitions to the windows login screen (I have an SSD as my main drive), but when this happens it can sit for several minutes with no obvious activity.

On each occasion I ended up hitting the reset button, at which point it boots up normally and reaches Windows in the usual time.  Except for one thing - the system time is showing the time it last shut down rather than the current time.  If I leave it a while it auto-updates eventually, or I can go into the time settings and manually force an update.

There's not been any other apparent system instability and 90-95% of the time it boots up fine (which makes troubleshooting a bit trickier since it could be days or even weeks before it occurs again).  The system time bit makes me think CMOS battery, but googling on that doesn't seem to suggest it would cause the loading lockup issue (and similarly there's plenty of results for windows getting stuck loading - mostly relating to windows update - but not so much coinciding with system time not updating).

If necessary I could post system specs and there's some maybe-relevant stuff in the event viewer, but I didn't want to clog up this initial post with more wall of text than necessary - I mostly just want to see if this jumps out as immediately recognisable symptoms to any of the more technically experienced members here.

[nenjin]

Have you let windows check for problems? Weird system time issues would also lead me to believe there's an issue with the CMOS battery but as you say, it doesn't usually result in Windows locking up during load. So that would make me think the issue is internally somewhere in Windows.

Out of curiosity, when you get one of these failed to load moments and reboot, and go to the BIOS, do you have the correct system time there?

[Biowraith]

When you say let windows check for problems, how would I do that?  I've been in the "Troubleshoot" section under Update & Security in the settings, but I'm not sure which (if any) of the categories would apply.  I tried the windows update one and it suggested there were pending updates and gave me the option to 'fix' that, but after running the fix that there weren't actually any pending updates; I also tried the hardware and devices one and the blue screen one but it didn't find any problems on those (well, it actually says it couldn't identify the problem).

I haven't checked the BIOS time after any of the incidents, which in retrospect I'm kicking myself for - I'll do that next time it happens (BIOS is showing correct system time just now, but I've had a couple of successful boots since the last time it got stuck).

[nenjin]

Try a system file check in Windows, see if it finds any problems:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-update/system-file-check-sfc-scan-and-repair-system-files/bc609315-da1f-4775-812c-695b60477a93?auth=1

[Biowraith]

Ok, tried the two things on that link: sfc says did not find any integrity violations, and dism says no component store corruption detected.

[nenjin]

Might also try just a regular chkdsk: http://www.thewindowsclub.com/disk-error-checking-windows-8

Just to see if you have any hdd errors or bad sectors or something. Failing that.....boot it in safe mode and see if you can get the problem to reoccur after several restarts. If not then it's not a core windows component that's fucking up. You could also checking the Event Viewer in Windows 10 and look at system messages. Pinpoint the time it hung during a restart and see if Windows is reporting system errors around that time. Might pinpoint what is hanging up.

Another thing you could try is disabling a lot of stuff in Start Up. (You do this from the Task Manager.) One or more start up procedures may be hanging, especially if it needs to dial out for some reason and that dial out is failing.

[Biowraith]

I checked the Event Viewer at the time of a couple of the lock-ups and the only errors were the two you'd expect from having forced a restart (previous system shutdown was unexpected | system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first).

There are a handful of Warning events (134) for Time-Service saying NtpClient was unable to set a manual peer to use as a time source because of DNS resolution error, so I've manually set my DNS servers from auto-detect to google's ones and tried changing the time source (from my isp's to the windows one).  There's also a handful of other warnings (1014) for random sites failing to DNS resolve.  Neither the random sites or the time service warning events coincide with days/times that it got stuck loading up though (don't seem like the kind of thing that'd stop loading, just jumped out at me because they related to the time service and involve timing out).

There's also periodic Information events about the Time-Service talking about the VMICTimeProvider indicating the current hardware and operating environment is not supported and that this  is expected on non-HyperV-guest environments (event 158).  They tend to come in clusters of 3-4 events in the space of a few minutes, but again don't coincide with the loading lockups (I also have no clue what they're talking about, even after googling them).


In any case I'll try chkdsk (edit: ran it and no problems found) and the repeated restarts/safe mode thing.  I've also ordered a couple CR3032 batteries, just in case. 

And thank you for all the suggestions!

[nenjin]

Might also try flushing your DNS, just for shits and giggles.

[Biowraith]

Well, I had one more incident last night: while cleaning my monitor with the PC turned off I accidentally leant on the keyboard and that caused the PC to power on, which I wasn't expecting since I always shut down rather than hibernate/sleep.  I tried shutting down again and jabbed the keyboard again (print screen button) and it turned on again.  This time it froze on loading windows, so I reset and checked the BIOS for the system time - the clock wasn't out by more than a minute or so (unsurprising since it'd successfully booted just prior to that), but the date was showing 1/1/09.

This time also had an actual error message in the event viewer: Windows failed fast startup with error status 0xC00000D4. (event ID 29).  I wasn't previously aware of a fast startup feature, but I guess it works sorta similar to hibernate/sleep.  Googling that error wasn't super helpful (other than to confirm the nature of fast startup), but it did suggest that fast startup can sometimes be a bit flakey for some people.

So I've disabled fast startup to see if that makes a difference.  Ideally I'd not need to disable features, but since this feature makes a difference of maybe 1-2 seconds on boot I could live with that.  And with the BIOS system date resetting I'll swap out the CMOS battery once the replacement arrives too.

[nenjin]

I've had some weird sleep state behavior on PCs as well, where once it goes in to sleep mode it can take inordinate amounts of time to actually come out of it. I eventually disabled the feature on the mobo because I'd end up hard rebooting my PC anyways due to impatience.

[wierd]

I've had problems where devices will sleep, and soft-firmware based devices (Some intel HD audio chips, basically all broadcom chips, et al) will get into insane states and the system acts just plain goofy.

I typically disable hibernation because of this.