10 Second Hang before Login Screen

I have noticed on all my clean installations of Windows 8, that there is 10 Second Hang before the login Screen. (Nothing but a black screen)
Is there any fix for this? It gets pretty annoying when you're often changing in between a triple OS set up :huh:

That sounds normal, especially when you HAVE triple-boot OS's - If you have any USB drives or printers plugged in, that can range from 10 seconds to almost 5 minutes.

There is a point in my bootup where there is no video output at all, stays like that for 10 seconds, then it boots right up. It happens right before Auto-Login.

It's after the initial start of windows 8, Windows 8 starts booting normally for a little and than screen turns black, so what I have on other partitions shouldn't affect it. And i've had the problem even when I only had just Win 8.

I've never experienced a long black screen like this with any windows 7 System, so It would be a shame if this was considered normal for windows 8.

There is that slight delay while there is a flashing cursor up in the upper left hand of the screen. Then the Purple screen with the not very nice windows logo comes up. But if you do have USB stuff plugged in, it WILL affect the boot sequence, because the MB has to wait for all that crap to be detected and it always does this before the boot starts.

If you set your BCDedit to Legacy mode, it will boot normally, and lose that 10 second blank lag. The hold up, you see is because of the stupid Windows 8 Boot GUI. Shut it off, and it will be exactly like Windows 7, and boot almost as fast.

This problem seems to have nothing to do with boot, Ive used Windows 8 on both uefi and bios mode, MBR and GPT tables, as well as with several different bootloaders including Grub2, Chameleon and the Stock Windows 8 one.

Though I will try what you suggested,

bcdedit /set {default} bootmenupolicy legacy

This should change it right?

Yep - There is a BCDedit tutorial in the Tutorials section, but what you posted looks pretty much correct.

See If changing it to Legacy helps out - Also, if you can, turn off your Motherboard BIOS screen, try to get it to show you the verbose booting sequence. I can do it on both of my machines but they are very old.

I only mention USB devices cos I had a printer that, when plugged in and turned on, would stall my boot. My system has a Card Reader, and that adds a few seconds to boot up time as well. Plus 2 big USB hard drives and a couple of flash sticks. Only the Printer stalls my system.

Looks like i cant do anything BCD related since im not actually using the windows bootloader to boot,
btw i don't actually have windows 7 installed with win 8

You would not be IN windows 8 without the Boot GUI. Sure you can run BCDedit, you have to run it from Safe Mode Administrator Account:

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/5245-startup-options-enable-disable-windows-8-a.html

To do it, you have to make your Admin account Visible and give it a password that you know. You can do that in the Management Console under "Local Users and Groups" - Find the Administrator user, enable it, and add a simple password. Then restart in Safe Mode and Log in to Administrator. You;ll be able to run BCDedit then.

If you don't wanna go through all of that, download this program:

Optimize, tweak, clean, speed up and repair Windows 8 - Windows 8 Manager

Free 15 day trial, which is how I got it, and I liked it and bought it. Just run the trial and open it to here:



You'll notice that the box that says "Enable Windows 8 GUI Boot Menu Mode" is unchecked - This is basically the same as running BCDedit. Actually, it's a good program, you may be able to use it to find any other reasons for the 10 second lag. Use the Startup Manager in the Optimizer section- It shows stuff that ccleaner won't show.

This is what mine looks like..

Just for the fun of it, I disabled all 170 or so Microsoft services, to see if the hang would still be there...
And it was

I don't see how you can even be booting to 8 like that, that's really odd! Is this running from an external drive?

You said the delay was on "All of your Windows 8 installations" - You mean on the same machine or on different machines? Is this running from an external drive?

If you could get into legacy boot menu mode, the lag would not be as pronounced.

I'm going to ask Shawn about this, as to why your boot is invisible.

Like I said, on my current Laptop I don't use the windows bootloader. Instead I'm using chameleon bootloader.
I only use internal HD's on my Laptop. I installed win 8 on my Laptop several times using different settings. That's what I mean by "all my installations".

Recently I installed windows 8 on another Laptop, and had the same 10 second black screen.
And just now I installed windows 8 on my tower computer. And also got the 10 second black screen.
My tower computer IS using the windows bootloader. So I was able to change to legacy bootmenu mode using the code I posted earlier. However this made no difference whatsoever.

So since I have the same hang/delay on 3 different computers, and after many clean Windows 8 installs, all I'm left thinking, is either everyone has this 10 second black screen, or I have a messed up Windows 8 install DVD.

If this is common through all of your installations, it is either somethign to do with the Chameleon Bootloader, or all windows 8 does this. I have a black screen, but it is usually for about 3 seconds in between the initial Purple Screen and my Login. It's not really a back screen, it's a "No Input" screen.

The Chameleon Bootloader does not show up in the Windows Bootloader, naturally... Is there a way to configure Chameleon to not show the Windows Boot GUI?

XweAponX said:

The Chameleon Bootloader does not show up in the Windows Bootloader, naturally... Is there a way to configure Chameleon to not show the Windows Boot GUI?

Click to expand...

I'm not sure what you mean by this

And It wouldn't be the chameleon bootloader, as I've had the 10 second delay on both laptops before I put chameleon on them, and I have it on my tower computer right now which doesn't have chameleon on it.

Well mine is probably black from having no input, and it is between the initial logo Screen and my Login, though I don't understand why it would be 10 seconds long (exactly 11.3 last time it booted)

There is no way to configure the Chameleon Loader? Turn it on, off? If you disable it temporarily then you can use the BCDedit command or Windows Manager. Then turn Chameleon back on. Then the 10 second interval should be less. But I would not do that if it would cause problems.

If it's 10 seconds always on the same machine, it may just be the machine. The next time I reboot I'm going to time the "no input" phase and see if it is 10 seconds.

Well all I have to do is rewrite the Master boot record sector to get windows bootloader back
If I remember correctly, "bootrec.exe /fixmbr" does just that

Thought after changing to legacy boot menu on my tower computer didn't effect the delay, I wont bother trying it on my laptop

Ok, then it has to be the particular machine. The machine I'm using now, has a 3 second delay like that, my other machine, about a second. Both AMDs and Asus MN2s but I have a lot of USB drives on this one. The Asus Laptop I ordered about a month back, had a 10 second lapse, that was an i3

any consultation im getting it about 10 sec black same place as yours ,{i just turn computer on and go to the can and it seems like it loads really quick lol] on a old Dell optiplex 745

Sooo... I've made a discovery, when I have a CD inside my tower PC, the 10 second black screen turns into a 2 second black screen...

And this is consistent, I timed it three time with a CD inside, 3 times without a CD inside, switching each time

it must be checking for one ,and find it quick than it doesn't find one ,check the boot order in the bios setup ,and maybe remove cdrom as a boot option