I built this fairly new PC with a 14th-generation Intel Core i7, a KLEVV M.2 SSD as the Windows boot drive, 32GB of DDR5 memory, a SanDisk SATA SSD, and two mechanical hard drives. Sometimes it starts almost instantly, but other times it sits at the ASUS startup screen for several minutes, goes to a black screen with only the mouse visible, and eventually reaches the Windows login screen after around 15 minutes. When this happens, Windows is nearly unusable and opening even simple programs takes ages, although Task Manager doesn't show anything obviously maxed out. The system is about three months old, and the problem happens after both cold starts and restarts. What should I check?
4 Answers
Look at the disk activity rather than just overall CPU and memory usage. A dying drive may show 100% utilization with almost no read or write throughput, which can make Windows appear frozen. Once you can boot, check the SMART status with a reputable drive-health tool and back up anything important immediately.
Also enter the firmware setup and confirm that the M.2 SSD is the first boot device. If the other drives contain old Windows boot partitions, the motherboard may be trying them before the actual system drive. With the extra drives disconnected, manually select the M.2 drive as the boot device and remove obsolete boot entries if necessary.
Start by disconnecting both mechanical hard drives and test the computer with only the boot SSD connected. Windows checks attached drives during startup, and a failing hard drive can cause extremely long delays or make the whole system stall even when Task Manager looks normal. If the issue disappears, check the drives’ health and replace the failing one.
Since the problem happens on both cold boots and restarts, it’s less likely to be ordinary startup behavior. The black screen followed by a spinning cursor points more toward a storage, bootloader, or Windows installation problem than a simple background update. Test with the extra drives unplugged, try Windows recovery or Safe Mode, and run startup repair. If it still happens with only the M.2 installed, check the M.2 connection and health, then consider reinstalling Windows after backing up your data.
I removed both mechanical drives, but the boot time actually became even longer. I’ll check the firmware boot order and try selecting the M.2 drive manually.