Reboot takes more than 4 minutes!

Hello Elder,

Thanks for your help. Here are the answers to your questions :

Will you supply a few links to where the problem has been reported by several users so we can compare them?

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/280373-32-very-slow-boot-times-adding-hard-disc-system-boot

What is the "Microsoft program checking the partition integrity" that you determined that runs at startup that takes all the time?

=> This is a startup routine that checks partition integrity. Not sure what the exact process name is. I did the troubleshooting almost 9 months ago...

How much time does it take when it is misbehaving?

=> 4 minutes

How much time does it take when it is not misbehaving?

=> 30 seconds

What is the drive letter of the device where Windows is installed?

=> C

What is the drive letter of the device where your backup is installed?

=> F

Are either of these devices solid state drives?

=> System is SSD, then there are 2 others non SSD HD drives

The point is that if I disconnect the HD drive with the backup (with system image) or if I modify backup options to not include system image, then the issue goes away...

There are lots of participants in that topic from tomshardware but sooner or later they all seemed to find a solution...

A BIOS change

Changing SATA port connections (if a SATA drive)

Changing USB port connections (if a USB drive)

Turning off system protection on the external drive (a good idea)

System Protection should really only be enabled on your system drive anyway:

I know it seems like a Windows problem at the moment but if it was a bug in Windows none of those folks would have gotten their stuff to work... but they all resolved the issue (sooner or later) by making various adjustments.  If it was a Windows bug it seems they would still be having the problems.

I quit using Windows backup a long time ago because it can be troublesome and has very limited options and flexibility.  Microsoft is not in the backup/restore business so you might consider looking at alternative products from companies that are in the backup/restore business where that is all they do all day long.

Popular lately (and what I switched to is Marcium Reflect:

http://www.macrium.com/

You can get the free version or use the Home version free for 30 days.

I get the feeling that the problem lies somewhere with the sheer size of your backup with image (how big is it) and your backup with no image (how big is it).  Somehow Windows is having trouble digesting the large one so even if you were to use another backup program you still might have the same problem if your backup with image is large, but remember all those folks in tomshardware got their stuff working eventually.

It is not something I know how to reproduce to troubleshoot.  I may make some adjustments here and there to see if I can reproduce it

I did all I could from a H/W and S/W point of view. I don't use external drives. I upgraded to latest BIOS release. I updated all the drivers I could update.

You are probably right when you say that one difference between the backups with and without system images is their size. Still Microsoft should offer a solution for this. This is a S/W problem. Windows is taking ages to boot because of this issue.

Windows includes solutions for RAID, backups, antivirus, etc... We all know those are far from being perfect but these are part of Windows and supposed to work. If they don't work, this is Microsoft problem. I have paid huge money for my Windows 7 Pro license so they need to make it work. I don't see why I would pay for an external solution to workaround a bug in Windows.

I now expect Microsoft to come back to me asap and debug the issue by themselves. I have spent already more than 100 hours debugging the issue and this is way enough for a MS bug...

Did you check/adjust the System Protection Properties so only your system drive is monitored?  That seemed to work for a couple people.

If you want to experiment you can tell Windows NOT to check the drive for consistency where the backup is stored knowing that someday the drive may really have a problem that needs to be fixed and Windows won't try to fix it.

For the experiment first open a command prompt as Administrator:

Then run each of these command separately and tell us what they say:

fsutil  dirty  query  c: 

fsutil  dirty  query  f:

Are the volumes dirty or NOT dirty?

Now you can tell Windows NOT to check the integrity on the volume where your large backup is (if that is F) with this command:

chkntfs  /x  f:

That tells Windows NOT to check drive F when Windows starts...  when you reboot with the image backup are things better?  If so you could leave it like that but if there ever really is an integrity problem (if the volume becomes dirty for some reason) Windows will not know about it or try to fix it.

After the experiment you can (and probably should) set things back to normal with this command:

chkntfs  /d

One probably last thing from me for today.

I created a Windows backup with System image on my D drive and right clicked the folder called WindowsImageBackup and and chose to 'Restore previous versions' and there are none (because that drive is not being monitored):

What does yours say?