Please wait... boot time!

[Olliedawg]

Had a power outage yesterday which lasted for over an hour (yippiee!). Gracefully powered down all of our VM's/Hosts etc. before the UPS's gave way. Rebooted back up once power was on & everything is looking golden. I thought I was in the all clear with no issues until this morning came around. We have a typing club every morning in one of our IT rooms which is staffed by a TA. The TA comes to my office and says that almost half of the computers are stuck on a blue screen and just say "Please wait". They had been stuck in this state for over 10 minutes.

 

The IT room was free for most of the day so I had plenty of time to investigate. I powered on all of the machines & it seems very sporadic with regards the boot times. The fastest now being around 2 minutes, with the worst being nearly 15 minutes to get past the "please wait" screen. This did not happen at all before the power outage. Boot time prior to this was sub 1 minute to get to the windows login screen, everytime, on every machine. Once the machines boot into windows, its business as usual, no issues to report whatsoever.

 

These machines in question are HP EliteOne 800 G1 AIO's & are around 6 years old now.

 

What I have tried on a few machines to rectify the long "please wait" screen -

- Ran Memory tests (all machines I tested passed)

- Checked SMART info for storage (all good..)

- Re-image with MDT

- Re-image with MDT on a new SSD

 

Even with a new storage drive, and a fresh reimage, I still get presented by the lovely "please wait" screen for a couple of minutes!

 

Has anyone else experienced anything like this before?

 

*edit* I do have fast startup disabled, although this has been disabled for a long while before these issues became present.

Edited July 18, 2023 by Olliedawg

[davethetekkie]

I’d probably say enabling verbose mode on your clients via GPO would be a good idea here so you get something a bit more descriptive than “please wait” to play with. One you know which step is dragging you’re in a far better position!

[Olliedawg]

I’d probably say enabling verbose mode on your clients via GPO would be a good idea here so you get something a bit more descriptive than “please wait” to play with. One you know which step is dragging you’re in a far better position!

 

I’ll give that a go tomorrow - I’ve never used this “verbose mode” before but a quick google & it sounds very useful

 

Thank you

[3s-gtech]

Startup script running which is unable to execute properly?

 

Another annoying one is a printer being offline that’s added at startup, seen that add 5 minutes to login before now.

[Olliedawg]

Startup script running which is unable to execute properly?

 

Another annoying one is a printer being offline that’s added at startup, seen that add 5 minutes to login before now.

 

Don't have any start up scripts running for that set of PC's - I do have a printer applied via group policy for that room which I added a couple of weeks ago, ready for the printer to be moved into there during first week of summer, it is indeed offline at the moment. I will try disabling that & see if there is any difference, hasn't seemed to cause any issues up until the power outage though (unless its a coincidence!)

[Davit2005]

Is this after the login or before?

 

On an effected client check what logonserver it is using by running %logonserver% in the run window if you have more than one DC. I've seen before a faulty DC delay from login to working desktop for upto 30min on PCs that used that DC for logon. As others have said I'd also check logon scripts too.

[foofighterjim]

I would have a look at the switches concerned too, start with the logs, ensure Spanning Tree is enabled as you could have a specific client with a faulty NIC disrupting everything else (not completely uncommon after a power issue).

[Olliedawg]

Well I disabled the printer GPO - back to normal now! Can't believe it was something so simple.. Also strange that this GPO has been set for at least the past 2 weeks & has been fine.

[PotNoodleTech]

I've got verbose mode on all the pcs all the time - very handy for troubleshooting.

[Steve21]

Well I disabled the printer GPO - back to normal now! Can't believe it was something so simple.. Also strange that this GPO has been set for at least the past 2 weeks & has been fine.

 

We have had similar before and ironically it wasn’t the GPO at fault but where the printer was turned off and for some reason the mapping would wait 15 minutes to time out rather than just going, oh it’s off, na na na

 

Turning printer back on instantly “fixed” the GPO

 

Might be worth checking if it’s something stupid like that, as it could be one is still off after the power etc

 

Steve

[3s-gtech]

Glad it was simple. This is one of those stupid things - it should have a short timeout setting because the printer will either be on and connect, or off and not.