Windows takes forever to boot, but after its very fast

Hello everyone, i stumble upon the most weird situation with a laptop. It's an Asus S400 core i3 that came with Windows 8. The computer was fine and we wanted to do a clean installation of Windows, so we tried the restore app from Asus and it neved worked (it got stuck at initializing HDD for over 3 hours). So we took a copy from the office of Windows 8.1 Pro and tried to install, and it got stuck at "Windows is loading files" and it stayed there for hours.

After trying Hirens Boot i realized the HDD and the RAM where fine, so i took the HDD to another laptop and formatted there and copy some files, it was working perfect. Somehow i managed the computer to install Windows (The loading of files screen at installation took 45 minutes, but after that it installed perfectly)

Windows loaded, it ran smoothly and benchmarks where showing the computer very fast, so i decided to restart it to finish the install of Office. Shutdown was almost inmediately, but then it got stuck at boot at circle loading, it is there for almost 30 minutes and then the computer goes to Sleep. When i press again the power on button to get it off Sleep mode computer is working fine, very fast like nothing has happened. The computer is not booting in UEFI because when i enable it, the HDD is not recognized.

Am i crazy or is Windows messing up with me? Could it be a HDD problem?

Thanks for any comment, i would really appreciate any help regarding this topic,

I would like to reply, because the problem is now gone and maybe someone will like to know what was causing my headaches.

Computer came with an SDD for ultra fast cache (size about 24gb) that cannot be removed. Somehow that SSD was formatted and it had a visible partition of 350mb. I say that and knew it was very weird. So i formatted the disk using Windows Disk manager and left it with no partitions and no format. Then restarted the computer.

Computer boot time is now 30 segs. I hope this helps someone because it took over a week for me to figure it out.

Best Regards

Juan

I'll say congratulations and good info for future reference. :thumb:

It is difficult to troubleshoot over the internet sometimes. So many different computer configurations and posters often leave something out that is very relevant to the problem.