Win7 hangs at Splash Screen but otherwise Boots normally

[BamaInArk]

So I have a dual boot Win7/Win10 system. It's an older system so nothing critical however I do use the computer for a specific task plus nice to have a Win7 system to fall back too occasionally.

Dual booting using an M.2 NVMe with the each OS on it's own partition. 990FX/FX-8350. Anyway several months back Win7 quit booting while the Win10 partition has been working normally. I would fiddle with it occasionally trying to figure out what was going on but could never get anywhere. I cannot boot to Safe Mode nor Safe Mode w/Command Prompt. The boot hangs at the same spot while attempting Safe Mode. However when I thought it wasn't booting what it is doing normally is the screen gets to the Splash Screen and hangs there. But the system actually continues to boot in the background. Except again the Splash Screen is all that is displaying.

I can click the mouse and see the drive light flashing. I can get keyboard shortcuts to work in the blind. I can hit the power button and the system will perform a normal shut down.

I cannot figure out a way to troubleshoot. I swapped GPUs thinking a different one might help. Nope. I cannot be sure if this is a hardware issue or a software. Since I cannot get to Safe Mode and can't perform any troubleshooting tasks. And although the system seems to boot normally, again, I cannot see the screen to perform any maintenance/troubleshooting functions.

I do have a backed up Image of the whole boot drive but unfortunately it's about a year and a half old now. So if I do a restore I'd have to do a lot of Updates to the Win10 installation side. Plus I'd like to see if I can tackle this one.

 

[remm]

I do not use W10 but am wondering if there is a BIOS setting that W7 requires that W10 does not, that was originally set correctly for the dual boot arrangement, but perhaps the BIOS reset its defaults along the way (can happen if the BIOS batt needed replacing, or sometimes can happen in odd circumstances without the user being aware), causing W7 to stop booting ?

As an anecdotal aside, I tried a dual boot system in the long past with Windows (XP/Vista) and it worked beautifully for many months, then XP would not boot and it was one hassle after the next with no apparent reason for the failures. (That is, I didn't do anything diff or install new sfw/hdw and it worked fine, then suddenly, not.) It's like dual boot systems have an expiry date. I never bothered again, but hope you get yours working.