Slow Pre-Session Init Boot Phase (WPR Log Attached)

Hi Everyone!

I've had a long- running issue where my PC will get stuck in the pre-session init boot phase. As far as I can tell it has something to do with storport.sys polling RAID devices and repeatedly timing out. Only problem, I've never setup RAID on my machine before. I did change from an Intel CPU/Mobo to AMD, and I have cloned my OS from a HDD to an SSD and also converted to GPT. Somewhere along the way it seems like the configuration may have been corrupted and I'm at my wits end on how to fix it.

OS Info:



Things I've tried:

1. SFC
2. DISM
3. CHKDSK
4. Boot Repair
5. Inplace Repair
6. Updating to Win11 (problem existed since Win10 so posting here)
7. Removing references to RAID in registry (including setting RaidEnabled values to 0)
8. Enabling RAID in BIOS, then disabling it (it was worth a shot)
9. Deleting all old drivers (including hidden drivers)
10. Updating all drivers
11. DDU all chipsets and rinstalling chipset and GPU drivers
12. CSM disabled
13. Reinstalling Windows
14. Sacrificing three bananas to Cthulu
15. Uninstalling all antiviruses and disabling early launch antivirus (though that still seems to run)
16. Disabling and re-enabling page file
17. Consolidating MBR (this did help, but speed quickly degraded again)
18. Using TRIM and creating a 10% blank partition for over-provisioning
19. Toggling XMP
20. Altering the number of cores used for boot and how much ram used for boot
21. Using ntfs-fix in Ubuntu
22. Using boot-repair in Ubuntu (different from the previous boot repair mentioned)
23. Disabling TPM and secure boot
24. Probably more I've already repressed from trauma

As can be seen, normal fixes don't appear to be cutting it for this doozy.

I can't seem to upload the WPR ZIP here, but I did Upload it to Google Drive Google Drive: Sign-in

Would appreciate any help!

Try enabling RAID in BIOS, then boot to safe mode, then boot to normal mode. If that works, go back to BIOS and change back to AHCI mode, then boot to safe mode and then to normal mode. Unclear if you already tried this.

steve108 said:

Try enabling RAID in BIOS, then boot to safe mode, then boot to normal mode. If that works, go back to BIOS and change back to AHCI mode, then boot to safe mode and then to normal mode. Unclear if you already tried this.

I had tried to activate RAID and switch back, but did not try safe mode booting afterwards. Booting into safe mode after still resulted with a "no boot device" BSOD after enabling RAID. To boot after enabling RAID I'd need to initialise my drive as RAID compatible which, according to the BIOS, wipes the drive. So no-bueno there. My thanks for the suggestion though!

Edit: I will add that the delay I experience during boot was present after enabling RAID. This was before the boot device BSOD, so it seems like a BIOS bug that affects the pre-session init.

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To further add to the oddity of the situation, I have found that the storport raid functions shouldn't even run if there are no RAID devices, as can be seen in this decompiled storport.sys:



There's an IF statement that will skip the RaInitializeDriver call if 0 is returned by RaidGetPortData()

So the question is; why is RaidGetPortData() returning something other than 0? I could understand RaidGetPortData() returning a negative number in the case of an error, which would evaluate to true, but that would be a pretty bad bug.

Switch Windows 10 from RAID/IDE to AHCI - Knowledgebase / Microsoft Windows - Critical Technology Solutions - Helpdesk try this method

zinou said:

Hi @Sieyk
Accessing the boot trace on your google drive is requesting a password!

Sorry! I do not usually use GDrive for sharing files, so I shared it incorrectly.

Here is the correct link: DESKTOP-70EKEAN.11-16-2021.16-29-27.Boot_1.7z - Google Drive

It should extract to a ~10GB WPR file. If you'd like a smaller one, just let me know!

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steve108 said:

Switch Windows 10 from RAID/IDE to AHCI - Knowledgebase / Microsoft Windows - Critical Technology Solutions - Helpdesk try this method

Rather than using BCDEdit, I just used MSConfig to boot to safe boot minimal (it does the same thing, right?). I did the same process as outlined in that post, but got Inaccessable Boot Device BSOD after switching to RAID.

Sieyk said:

Sorry! I do not usually use GDrive for sharing files, so I shared it incorrectly.

Here is the correct link: DESKTOP-70EKEAN.11-16-2021.16-29-27.Boot_1.7z - Google Drive

It should extract to a ~10GB WPR file. If you'd like a smaller one, just let me know!

- - - Updated - - -



Rather than using BCDEdit, I just used MSConfig to boot to safe boot minimal (it does the same thing, right?). I did the same process as outlined in that post, but got Inaccessable Boot Device BSOD after switching to RAID.

Yes, I believe either way boots you to safe mode.

Let's see what zinou finds from the boot trace now since you get a BSOD trying RAID in safe mode.

Another thought ..... Is your BIOS fairly current?

steve108 said:

Another thought ..... Is your BIOS fairly current?

Yep, it's the 4.70 BIOS, which is the most recent stable build. I did try the 4.76 BIOS to see if it fixed the issue, but it ended up causing a hard-reset problem with the Network Controller so I flashed back. The 4.76 BIOS also did not fix the issue.