Cold boot freezes twice before finally succeeding on third try

I'm running the ASUS M3A76-CM motherboard with an AMD 64 Athlon processor--8 Gb of RAM.

Recently I upgraded to Windows 10 from 7, and now have a cold-booting problem. When I do a complete shutdown, and try to boot up at another time, the first press of the Startup button on my tower freezes at the Setup screen.

I have to do a hard shutdown, and on the second try, it gets past the Setup screen and begins starting Windows, but freezes about 5 seconds later.
Another hard shutdown followed by a third try finally succeeds in normal bootup.

I tried disabling ASUS Express Gate in Setup, but that doesn't solve the problem. It still takes three attempts to cold boot successfully. Since the only thing that's changed on my machine is the upgrade to Win10, I suspect that's involved.

cottonball said:

LRK,

Welcome to the forum!

It may or may not be upgrading to Windows 10, and, there are other considerations...

Try following the mainboard's manual to reset the CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide semiconductor).

Before doing so, make sure you unplug the power cord. Next, to disperse internal voltage​, hold down the On button for about 30 seconds.

There is also the possibility this issue could be related to hardware, like a faulty power supply.

Thanks, I'll check out those possibilities. This is a system I built myself using an old HP tower. I had to do a bit of a hack on connecting the start button leads to the ASUS terminals, but it always worked fine prior to the Win 10 upgrade. I'll open it up and check those connections, and if they're still ok, will try the CMOS reset. Power supply is quite new, and seems to be fine.