OT: interminable spinning dots on boot-up

[Dave Labrecque]

Booting up this morning that's all I got. They just spin forever. Rebooting produces the same thing. Ideas? Suddenly, I have no access to my computer. :-(

Windows 10 Home

[Richard Rupert]

"Interminable"... how long did you actually wait, Dave? Yesterday I had this same thing happen, and I'd guess I waited 10 minutes until the computer finally re-booted on its own and all was well from then on. I can only guess that there was some sort of Windows update that was installed. I'm running Windows 10 home as well.

Now that I think more about it, at one point along with the spinning dots, the message "Installing updates. Please don't turn off your computer" came on the screen. (Or some language like that).

[mr_es335]

Hello,


I can only guess that there was some sort of Windows update that was installed......Dave, I would suspect this to be the case as well. Boot it and leave it...I have seen this take a few hours...!

[Tim Miskimon]

Not to sound preachy but that's why it's best to not let Windows do automatic updates.
I keep my stuidio computer off line of the internet unless I'm downloading new drivers or software.
I can't imagine having a client come in to record and having windows updates keep us from recording fora few hours.

[Richard Rupert]

Not to sound preachy but that's why it's best to not let Windows do automatic updates.
I keep my stuidio computer off line of the internet unless I'm downloading new drivers or software.
I can't imagine having a client come in to record and having windows updates keep us from recording fora few hours.
I can't speak to Dave's situation, but in my case I wasn't talking about my studio computer; that's still running XP. :)

[Dave Labrecque]

Okay, turns out it ended up going 10 or 20 minutes when I let it. I came back later on and the login screen was waiting for me. What I don't get is that there was an update yesterday that I scheduled for a time when I wasn't going to be on the computer. And as far as I know it did automatically reboot and do that update. So, I don't know what's going on this morning. I thought I had it setup to ask me when a good time to do an update is. Like yesterday. But then this morning, this, without warning.

Later in the day today I decided it was a good time to open up the box, vacuum out all the dust from the past year, and put in the extra four gig of RAM that I've had sitting around. I did all that, put it back together, hooked it up and turned it on. Now, I'm staring at the spinning dots, again. Argh. WTF?

[Dave Labrecque]

Ugh. It seems to do this everytime I reboot, now. This morning when turning on the computer I got the same thing. No messages about updates. Just spinning dots. For way too long. I may do a reinstall after all. This is no good.

[Angie]

Ugh. It seems to do this everytime I reboot, now. This morning when turning on the computer I got the same thing. No messages about updates. Just spinning dots. For way too long. I may do a reinstall after all. This is no good.

Dave,
I don't use 10 in the studio, but sometimes when I have too many USB devices hooked up the computer won't boot correctly or it will take a long time to shut down. Just a thought.

[mr_es335]

Dave,

Good point that Angie made about USB - especially "hubbed" devices. Disconnect these - if used, and see what happens.

Dave, you might have a failed update installation...and as there are many, many, many, etc. - this may take considerable time to actually determine. Try booting to Safe Mode and see how quickly it boots up. If it boots quickly , this might be problem.
Note: Booting to Safe Mode can be "fun" with UEFI - so have a look at this (http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-2569556/safe-mode-windows.html)...

Could also be network-related as well...or the USB issues mentioned by Angie.

PS: And Dave...you should be using disk imaging (heee, heee, and I mean this in a funny, humorous manner). If you are using more than one drive, I can help you with this.

[bcorkery]

Dave,

Have you tried booting in safe mode?
Sometimes just doing that seems to help "align" the planets.

-Bill

[mr_es335]

Bill

Have you tried booting in safe mode? Sometimes just doing that seems to help "align" the planets....I suggested this to Dave as well. What is a bit scary Bill - is that your comment just may be true!! Hmmmmm...

[Dave Labrecque]

Thanks, lady and gentelmen. I am using all the USB ports, but no hub(s). But, there was never a problem till the most recent update. :p

From what I've seen online, it's a real PITA to get into safe mode under these circumstances.

As for disk imaging -- Acronis stopped working for me once I went to Win10, and, sadly, I haven't stayed on top of that. I started exploring some respected free options, but never finished following-through. Much like my golf swing. But I digress.

At this point, I have two important sessions that need to happen tomorrow, so I don't want to mess around anymore. I feel pretty good about doing a clean install, anyway, since I haven't done one yet with Windows 10. (I was still working from the direct upgrade from Win7.)

Oh, and more info... I was away all weekend, but kept "checking in" via TeamViewer. The system seemed to keep dropping out of logged-in mode and returning to spinning-dots mode, either with the blank screen or the Windows-logo login screen. May have been spontaneous reboots, but I don't think so. This was probably related to TeamViewer locking me out each time I went away; but, typically, it's a simple re-sign-in thing to get back in.

Anyway, thanks, again, for all your ideas. I'm plunging forward. Wish me luck. :D

[Danny O]

Dave...upgrading to Windows 10, may not have been a good idea if your going to use Bob's software(SS, SAC). This video has been posted before... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1kGMCfb2xw ...WATCH!!!..You CAN NOT completely turn off Windows updates as you can in previous Microsoft OPS. During an install(or maybe later as well), you can turn off certain monitoring features that stop your computer from sending data to Microsoft, but every time you update, some of these features are turned on again(WITH OUT NOTIFYING YOU), not to mention other programs that may be trying to update(like Adobe stuff), and perhaps anti-virus and malware programs that are scanning data as it comes in. In other words Dave, with Windows 10, you are going to be starring at spinning dots for the rest of your LIFE!:(, and it doesn't matter how many processors or cores you have, with windows the more cores, the more cores it uses to drag down your system. As was pointed in a previous post, Windows is NOT a real time operating system, but SawStudio and SAC are programs that need to handle REAL TIME events. My advice is to turn off your internet before you shut down and during a session, and or use the Spybot program that the video suggests or get another harddrive and set up a duel boot system with WinXP(BEST)...save yourself a lot of headaches.

[mr_es335]

Dave,

Danny O's point are quite valid and therefore, worth considering.

On the other side, I as far as I know, you cannot download a complete version of Windows 10 and install it from there using the Windows 7 PID.

This has NOT worked for me in the two occasions I tried it on.

Therefore, to perform a truly clean install, you may need to purchase a copy of Windows 10.

PS: Maybe someone out there has done this, but I have never be able to get it to work, at least not as stated.

You may want to have a look at this first (http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/wiki/insider_wintp-insider_install/how-to-troubleshoot-product-activation-in-windows/33f31475-93b3-4d1c-812f-4b21fbd807a7)...and this second (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10).

Hope this helps?

PS: For Acronis, you need version 2012 or newer for this to work. also, are you using GPT partitioning?

[Dave Labrecque]

Dave,

Danny O's point are quite valid and therefore, worth considering.

On the other side, I as far as I know, you cannot download a complete version of Windows 10 and install it from there using the Windows 7 PID.

This has NOT worked for me in the two occasions I tried it on.

Therefore, to perform a truly clean install, you may need to purchase a copy of Windows 10.

PS: Maybe someone out there has done this, but I have never be able to get it to work, at least not as stated.

You may want to have a look at this first (http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/wiki/insider_wintp-insider_install/how-to-troubleshoot-product-activation-in-windows/33f31475-93b3-4d1c-812f-4b21fbd807a7)...and this second (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10).

Hope this helps?

PS: For Acronis, you need version 2012 or newer for this to work. also, are you using GPT partitioning?


Well, I'm not ready to abandon Windows 10 just yet. I did the reinstall last night. I just used Microsoft's Install Media Creation Tool thingy to load up an SD card, then booted from that. What I've read is that Windows figures out that you have a valid license from your (or in this case, my) upgrade-from-Windows-7 history, which is on their servers somewhere. Works for me.

It was a little weird getting out of an install boot loop -- that they don't tell you about, apparently. After the initial install, there was a spontaneous reboot (with no instruction to pull the USB card reader with my install SC card), so it tried to start the install all over again. So, I pulled the reader and rebooted. Seemed to finish the install/setup fine after a couple tries.

I did enjoy some wacky shenanigans trying to get the boot to work right with the BIOS settings. Apparently, I needed to keep UEFI turned off. I'd turned it on along with the boot-from-USB stuff. But that caused the GPT prompt ("Windows can't install to this partition") when trying to install to the freshly formatted boot partition. When I turned UEFI off in the BIOS, I didn't get that prompt, and installation proceeded.

I don't actually have any idea what UEFI or GPT are. But I seem to have navigated the gauntlet, nonetheless.

Thanks, everyone, for your suggestions.