Ran xbootmgr OK, but 2nd & 3rd time had bad, & very bad results

[cyclometric]

Ran xbootmgr OK, but 2nd & 3rd time had bad, & very bad results

I have been wanting to diagnose what seems like a long time between the time I enter my credentials to log in to Windows and the desktop being settled in, after a cold boot or restart, so I followed the prereqs. as in the thread Gathering a Startup, Shutdown, Sleep, Hibernate, or Reboot Trace, including setting the DisablePagingExecutive to 1, and made sure I had the right tools installed.

I ran the exact command line in the tutorial:

xbootmgr –trace boot -traceFlags LATENCY+DISPATCHER+DISK_IO_INIT+NETWORKTRACE+MEMINFO+POWER+PERF_COUNTER+PRIORITY+REGISTRY+FILE_IO+FILE_IO_INIT -postBootDelay 300 -stackWalk Profile+ProcessCreate+CSwitch+ReadyThread+Mark+ThreadCreate+DiskReadInit+DiskWriteInit+DiskFlushInit+RegSetValue+RegCreateKey+RegSetInformation -resultPath C:\Boot_Trace

and the trace ran fine. After making some changes to speed up the boot, I ran it again. The system restarted as expected and after login it was running, but after the full delay, it errored out: "Couldn't find user-mode logger in active logger list." etc. etc. Thinking that was an anamoly, I ran it again, but after login, Bang! BSOD! and it trampled my TrueCrypt boot loader or volume header or whatever... after the BSOD and entering my TC password, I would get the error: "no bootable partition". I fixed it, though, thank goodness, but weird.

Do you think a "lite" version would be safer... A thread on MSFN - Trace Windows 7 Boot-Shutdown, etc. Issues says this:

xbootmgr -trace boot -traceFlags BASE+CSWITCH+DRIVERS+POWER -resultPath C:\TEMP

I don't want to tempt fate, though, but I would like to run the other command they mention, which is supposed to improve performance on us losers still on HDDs:

xbootmgr -trace boot -prepSystem -verboseReadyBoot

That thread says it will reboot 6 times, and lay down the files on the system drive to maximize Prefetch & take advantage of ReadyBoot. I'd sure like to run it but I am going to make a fresh system image first. What are your thoughts? Thanks,

 

[bobafetthotmail]

long time between the time I enter my credentials to log in to Windows and the desktop being settled in

This is usually caused by programs set to startup at boot. This tutorial tells you how to see if that is your issue and then how to fix it (basically disabling most "start at boot" things that don't have a very good reason to be).

In case you want to still have a lot of stuff load at startup, third party software like startup delayer can delay its startup so you can do stuff asap, while the loading process will happen in the background or when idle.

 

[cyclometric]

Thanks, I never did figure out what caused the issue, I guess because I had to spend so much time just getting my system to run without that awful "no bootable partition" error, and when I did get it back running, I had undone 3 days of work and trampled my system encryption!

I created scheduled tasks for some of the startup programs I suspected of being resource hogs (my AutoHotKey startup script, Internet Download Manager, and ASUS AI Suite (to manage my fan speeds), so they start delayed, but I'll check out startupdelayer.

The one program I can't get to start delayed is CrashPlan... even though I set the service to start delayed, and I disabled (and deleted) the startup item for the tray program, the program is recreating the shortcut to begin the tray every time I delete or disable it... going to check with their support team on that one.

Thanks for the help!