Question Any explanation for this weird boot behavior?

Jul 27, 2020
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I just booted up my 245KF (Gigbyte Z890 AORUS ELITE WIFI7 ICE mobo) and it always gets to the dual boot menu (Win11 and Win Server 2019). By default, it's on Win Server. I select Win11 and boot. Well, this time, after the AORUS boot logo, the screen flashes a bit (not a blinding flash. Just a very faint flash like something different happened) and I see the Windows desktop. What's more weird is that my Wifi is not set to auto connect (I prefer it that way since I don't use this PC much on the internet) but this time, it shows as connected already.

So what really happened? Did Windows load up from hibernation??? Never happened before since last December and I must've booted this thing up at least 50+ times now.
 

BonzaiDuck

Lifer
Jun 30, 2004
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Don't know if I can offer insight about this, but are you saying that the Server 2019 behaves as desired and the Win 11 doesn't?

My experience with Windows dual boot configurations was fairly stable until a feature update came along. I had Windows 7 and Windows 10 in the dual boot menu. I never had any real "disasters" with this, but I just decided I would avoid creating a dual-boot system in the future. I can certainly see that you could do this with the server OS and the Win 11. Did you mean that you had been hibernating the Win 11 configuration?
 
Jul 27, 2020
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Don't know if I can offer insight about this, but are you saying that the Server 2019 behaves as desired and the Win 11 doesn't?
No. My point was if it just booted really quick for some reason, it should've ended up in Server OS since that is the default. But it didn't. Ended up in Win11 with the Wifi still connected like I just woke it up from sleep but it was plugged off with even the PSU switch in the off position.
 

DaaQ

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Dec 8, 2018
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Update slid in?

I got home from a week vaca, (not really a vaca) and turned PC on and it did an update.

Had to reinstall W11P twice, and still have not got my 4 drive ssd RAID array back yet.

Mainly monitor issue, wouldn't run 240hz, but I saw finger prints, ect. I thought to myself DO THEY NOT THINK I WILL NOT NOTICE THIS SHIZ. Apparently. Monitor reset was all I needed to do, but wasted a weekend.
 
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Jul 27, 2020
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Mainly monitor issue, wouldn't run 240hz, but I saw finger prints, ect. I thought to myself DO THEY NOT THINK I WILL NOT NOTICE THIS SHIZ.
Kids??? How old?

Update slid in?
Could be but why are updates bypassing the boot menu? Happened just two days ago again. Went straight to Win11 desktop without letting me be the owner that I am and choosing Win Server 2025 that I prefer.
 

DaaQ

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Dec 8, 2018
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Kids??? How old?


Could be but why are updates bypassing the boot menu? Happened just two days ago again. Went straight to Win11 desktop without letting me be the owner that I am and choosing Win Server 2025 that I prefer.
One is 30 something, and who knows if they were watching their 3yr old, but wasn't his prints woulda been way worse, the girls are 9, 10, &11. So may end up being step children for my 30 something yr old child. 3 and 11yr old. B and G.
We have custody of the 9 and 10 yr old. (they are his but we have had them a majority of their life span so far. They also consider "here" Home.

Here's the rub, there are no visible buttons on this monitor MSI 49" QD-OLED 5120x1440p. There is a power light visible from front, power button is on backside to left of that light, there is another button on right IDK what it does. then in center is a small like D-pad left right up down and click to select.

You have to do a reach around from the underside of the power light to even locate these. I think my 10 yr old new it was there. (Granddaughter but I still call her mine along with her sister. we've raised them they live with us)

Maybe she tried showing her dad how to turn it on.

EDIT: but they think I won't notice stuff. I notice if my cat has been on my mousepad. (irritating) even which USB-C charging cables and wall blocks are supposed to be where and what cables have been took because nobody can use their eyes and find one themselves. Had to buy an extra ROKU remote due to this frivolous behavior, sheesh it makes me tired.
BIOS RAID or Storage Spaces?
It was originally built using storage spaces, but even diskpart can't find the other 2 disks. They are only 128GB x4 drives, bought when they were new back in the day, to make a raid stripe array over sata. M.2 I don't think was out yet.
SS 830 series, was about 100 ea or quite over 5-600 for a 500GB single drive, I think I got them around 89 usd ea.

I have installed the Bios RAIDXpert2 I think on early BIOS I was able to Build array with that but it affected boot times too much. Then went the Storage spaces route.
But the ASRock Nova AM5 has 2 SATA and the other 2 ports are from Asmedia chip.

May try the newer BIOS because I lost resizable bar on 3.40 and on my side it looks like SOC voltage is greyed out.

BACK to your issue, did anything in BIOS get accidentally swapped? Or possible boot loader corruption? Is server 2019 being treated like W10?
 
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Jul 27, 2020
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One is 30 something, and who knows if they were watching their 3yr old, but wasn't his prints woulda been way worse, the girls are 9, 10, &11. So may end up being step children for my 30 something yr old child. 3 and 11yr old. B and G.
We have custody of the 9 and 10 yr old. (they are his but we have had them a majority of their life span so far. They also consider "here" Home.

Here's the rub, there are no visible buttons on this monitor MSI 49" QD-OLED 5120x1440p. There is a power light visible from front, power button is on backside to left of that light, there is another button on right IDK what it does. then in center is a small like D-pad left right up down and click to select.

You have to do a reach around from the underside of the power light to even locate these. I think my 10 yr old new it was there. (Granddaughter but I still call her mine along with her sister. we've raised them they live with us)

Maybe she tried showing her dad how to turn it on.

EDIT: but they think I won't notice stuff. I notice if my cat has been on my mousepad. (irritating) even which USB-C charging cables and wall blocks are supposed to be where and what cables have been took because nobody can use their eyes and find one themselves. Had to buy an extra ROKU remote due to this frivolous behavior, sheesh it makes me tired.
I've heard kids are fun! :D

I bet if you kept a physical diary and wrote their antics down, you would need to get a new one every 180 days at least!

It was originally built using storage spaces, but even diskpart can't find the other 2 disks. They are only 128GB x4 drives, bought when they were new back in the day, to make a raid stripe array over sata. M.2 I don't think was out yet.
SS 830 series, was about 100 ea or quite over 5-600 for a 500GB single drive, I think I got them around 89 usd ea.

I have installed the Bios RAIDXpert2 I think on early BIOS I was able to Build array with that but it affected boot times too much. Then went the Storage spaces route.
But the ASRock Nova AM5 has 2 SATA and the other 2 ports are from Asmedia chip.
Have you tried each drive individually? Crystaldiskinfo should show the writes left (AFAIK the 830 series could do petabytes of writes but who knows if there were duds). Hopefully there wasn't anything important on them.

BACK to your issue, did anything in BIOS get accidentally swapped? Or possible boot loader corruption? Is server 2019 being treated like W10?
Nothing seems to be wrong. It works fine on the next boot. Maybe it's some sort of Win11 related quirk. I just installed Win11 25H2 alongside Win10 20H2 on Ryzen 5900X to try to benchmark the OS difference. On the boot menu, if I select Win10, it reboots and then goes straight to Win10 without showing the boot menu which is a weird way of working. I guess the Win11 boot menu loads something up (like global variables) that is not fully compatible with Win10 so a reboot is needed?
 

DaaQ

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Dec 8, 2018
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I've heard kids are fun! :D

I bet if you kept a physical diary and wrote their antics down, you would need to get a new one every 180 days at least!


Have you tried each drive individually? Crystaldiskinfo should show the writes left (AFAIK the 830 series could do petabytes of writes but who knows if there were duds). Hopefully there wasn't anything important on them.


Nothing seems to be wrong. It works fine on the next boot. Maybe it's some sort of Win11 related quirk. I just installed Win11 25H2 alongside Win10 20H2 on Ryzen 5900X to try to benchmark the OS difference. On the boot menu, if I select Win10, it reboots and then goes straight to Win10 without showing the boot menu which is a weird way of working. I guess the Win11 boot menu loads something up (like global variables) that is not fully compatible with Win10 so a reboot is needed?
My wife is keeping one for our 9yr old granddaughter, she has some issues, adhd diagnosed, therapy also. But we're keeping a "isms" book, a funny thing Z says. She comes up with some very funny comments. She will probably grow up and have no filter. She doesn't right now either lol. She had some zingers on her B-Day turning 9 years old. She's been waiting a whole year for that. Gonna be a fiery red head.

So I went and upgraded to BIOS v3.50 and sure enough resizable bar was back, and also sees the 2 m.2 and 4xssd drives again.

The BIOS RAID needs a floppy disk on a usb drive driver kinda thing. (I think?) got too tired last night after redoing the settings ect, It's called RAIDXpert 2on ASRock site. Idk if I wanna fool with using that or just storage spaces again. I can't remember if it was the AM3+ board that raid bios made take longer to boot, or if earlier version on this board. Probably the CHVF-Z.

maybe it is booting to last known boot state instead of halting to let you choose?
Kinda like these Roku TV's default is to go to home screen on power up. You have to change it to last input used to power on if using a set top box. (some ppl don't understand the multiple inputs still, in 2025. I have heard I want everything to run on ch3 still)
 
Jul 27, 2020
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My wife is keeping one for our 9yr old granddaughter, she has some issues, adhd diagnosed, therapy also. But we're keeping a "isms" book, a funny thing Z says. She comes up with some very funny comments. She will probably grow up and have no filter. She doesn't right now either lol. She had some zingers on her B-Day turning 9 years old. She's been waiting a whole year for that. Gonna be a fiery red head.
She might become a stand-up comedian!

maybe it is booting to last known boot state instead of halting to let you choose?
It's happened at least three times now and usually happens on a cold boot. Also, it's happening on only one PC (245KF with Gigabyte mobo) so I'm going to chalk it up as some UEFI issue with the particular BIOS (stock BIOS, never updated). Gigabyte is notorious for half baked BIOS. The only reason I'm not going to update is because I don't want to fix existing issue(s) and then get new much worse hair pulling ones.
 
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DaaQ

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She might become a stand-up comedian!


It's happened at least three times now and usually happens on a cold boot. Also, it's happening on only one PC (245KF with Gigabyte mobo) so I'm going to chalk it up as some UEFI issue with the particular BIOS (stock BIOS, never updated). Gigabyte is notorious for half baked BIOS. The only reason I'm not going to update is because I don't want to fix existing issue(s) and then get new much worse hair pulling ones.
Just read an article XDA maybe. Anyway it sounded like your issues with dual boot and just weird random stuff.

From fastboot. I think it's in windows. Where it is a hybrid between off and hibernate.
Maybe try turning it off.

It also said that sometimes it will startup too quick to be able to hit the boot menu key.

Worth a shot bro.
 
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DaaQ

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She might become a stand-up comedian!


It's happened at least three times now and usually happens on a cold boot. Also, it's happening on only one PC (245KF with Gigabyte mobo) so I'm going to chalk it up as some UEFI issue with the particular BIOS (stock BIOS, never updated). Gigabyte is notorious for half baked BIOS. The only reason I'm not going to update is because I don't want to fix existing issue(s) and then get new much worse hair pulling ones.
Since it is worth a shot here, I RAID 0d my 2 4tb NVME drives successfully. But now I can not get the 4xssd array to register, even with storage spaces. I think it is that "newer ASROCK chipset driver" from their website.

I was wanting to use it as a primer for Linux specially the Linux gaming distros.
Advice? ASRock x870E Nova, has 2 SATA onboard and an ASmedia controller for the other 2 SATA. The Asmedia seem to want to play ball.
 
Jul 27, 2020
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I used RAID exactly once in life with three 1TB HDDs (Intel Matrix RAID). The initialization of the array took 22 hours. I decided that this was just a bad idea and gave up on it.
 

mikeymikec

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May 19, 2011
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I used RAID exactly once in life with three 1TB HDDs (Intel Matrix RAID). The initialization of the array took 22 hours. I decided that this was just a bad idea and gave up on it.

Huh, I've used Intel desktop RAID a few times between 2013-2022, I've never had it take an unreasonably long time to initialise an array, usually the initialisation time matches the length of time a full format for one of the disks would take, IIRC.
 
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Huh, I've used Intel desktop RAID a few times between 2013-2022, I've never had it take an unreasonably long time to initialise an array, usually the initialisation time matches the length of time a full format for one of the disks would take, IIRC.
I think I used it in 2011 with a Core 2 Quad. It could have been the slow WD Green HDDs to blame. They were a considerable expense for me at the time so the RAID dream just sorta died after that disappointment.
 
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