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#21
This is really strange. It seems to be creeping up on you. See what Soluto has to say.
I'm happy to report, the mystery has been solved . I noticed / remembered that we keep a micro-SD to SD adapter in the card reader, just so there's one always on hand (we never use a full sized SD card, but very often plug a micro card in to transfer files). More out of desperation than anything else, I removed this and booted up. <POOF> 15 second boots and 3-4 second shutdowns, several times in a row. I put it back in, and 75-80 second boots and 45 second shutdowns. Removed it again, back to normal.
This seems strange to me, as we have always done this on this computer, so why now? Any thoughts on if / how I can fix this? Not critical obviously, but it is handy...
The only thing I can think of for what ever reason the SD adapter card reader usb port is set in the boot options in the bios. It is being checked on boot to see if it is boot-able. After the system decides that it can't be booted from it continues on looking for a boot drive. Why something like that would happen all of a sudden is unknown to me.
I didn't see anything specific referring to the card reader, but "usb" was an option. There's not a way to remove it from the sequence completely, but it was already the last item in the list. A bit of a mystery, but I can live with it.
Thanks to everyone for all your help with this!!
Good - note that card readers (USB or otherwise) show up as disks, whether there's media in them or not. Note that while BIOS issues are possible, once Windows has booted it should have control over all USB hardware (even in UEFI), so I don't think that's likely.
Obviously it's hard to say what is causing the issues for sure (since it did work at one point), but assuming you haven't installed any new software recently it probably is/was antivirus in some way hanging up boot. Again, whether or not there's a card, card readers show up as disk drives under Windows. Just something to think about.