black screen during bootup

Slugger · 22 Oct 2015

During boot up I get a black screen for about 1 min then the login for my account. I notice a lot of hard drive activity during the black screen. I'm using amd-catalyst-15.10beta-64bit-win10-win8.1-win7-oct12.exe (latest one).
Win 10 works fine except for the black screen. I've had this black screen since day one but it seems to be longer.
I have tried AMD 15.7.1 driver.

I don't have an on board graphics.

I'm almost thinking of grabbing another hard drive and do a clean install and see if that fixes it.

What in heck is windows doing when a black screen occurs?

AbAppletic · 22 Oct 2015

Do you have an SSD or HDD?
If you have an HDD, that's most likely the problem. It's probably a slow drive. If it's a Solid-State driver(SSD) Then it has to be corrupt. Replace the hard drive and it should fix the problem.
Note:
first try reinstalling windows 10 using a media drive.

DustSailor · 22 Oct 2015

I noticed it too. It shouldn't happen very often though, as in my case. Only thing I know to do: make sure drivers are updated every so often, and wait for Windows updates to fix some of these bugs. That's about all you can do, I think.

Some people recommend a clean install for Windows 10, but there is no guarantee that it will fix it, and it is a bit of a hassle.

DustSailor · 22 Oct 2015

Slugger said:

What in heck is windows doing when a black screen occurs?

In short: loading. You might be able to get the time down by optimizing your computer a bit. Things like disabling startup programs, getting a faster antivirus program (there are faster ones than Defender), faster SSD, more RAM, Disk Cleanup, and Drive Optimizer (Windows), etc.

Slugger · 22 Oct 2015

I thought about it and remembered I had changed the page file to another drive that happens to be slow when opening with explorer.
I reset it back to C: drive. Now it boots up faster. I still get a black screen but it is faster. So windows is playing around with the page file during the black screen. I have 24 gigs of ram. Would i be faster with no page file?

DustSailor · 22 Oct 2015

No, many programs require a paging file, and you will probably receive frequent pop-up errors if you disable it. It is recommended to have the paging file on an SSD. You can move the paging file to another SSD drive other than the OS drive (i.e. another drive entirely, NOT a partition on the same drive), which frees up the main drive a bit.

I always had trouble with that, so I just kept my paging file 'system-managed' and on the OS drive, like it is on default.

Slugger · 22 Oct 2015

I tried it without the pagefile and what a difference. Shaved off 30 secs. I'll set it back.
So it looks like an SSD drive is in my future.

Thanks all for the suggestions.

twl845 · 22 Oct 2015

I noticed a similar black screen period with WIN 7 as well. So when I first booted with WIN10 I assumed the black screen period of boot up to be normal. It's only a brief time, and if you know it's normal it's not disturbing. A few times it lasted a longer period than normal, and I got apprehensive, but then the desktop appeared.

DustSailor · 22 Oct 2015

Slugger said:

So it looks like an SSD drive is in my future.

You do not necessarily have to purchase one, But things WILL be faster if you do use one. If you're happy now, then no need to spend the extra Dolla

Slugger · 23 Oct 2015

The 3rd hard drive I am using is a Western Digital 1 Tb 7200 rpm SATA III drive. Sometimes when opening it with Windows Explorer is would pause for a few secs then open. Other times it opens quick. I have my main drive with a 320 gigs and another 2nd 320 gig drive. Both 320 gigs drive open quickly.
Maybe the 1TB drive is bad. I replaced it with another 1 TB drive. It does the same thing and it's on a different data drive channel.
So I'm leading toward maybe it's the Microsoft hard drive driver. It's definitely something in Windows 10 causing the occasional pause. I'm going to wait for the next big Win 10 update in November.