I have an ASUS laptop, GL552VW.  It is about 5 years old, but has not had any issues prior to this.  I've got a M.2 (SATA) drive and a mechanical drive in it, with the M.2 drive being installed immediately after purchase and no changes made since then.  It has 16GB of memory, which came with it.

This operated normally for about 6 years.  About a week ago, I booted the computer and it appeared frozen on the initial BIOS flash screen - didn't have the "press F2 for BIOS," just the initial logo.  After about 5 minutes I turned it off, and on again - same thing.  Hitting the F2 or delete key to get to the BIOS didn't do anything.  Looking online, I found that I could enter the BIOS immediately by holding the F2 key down while pressing the power button to turn it on, and was able to so so - resetting to default settings had no effect.

At one point I left it on at the boot screen and walked away.  When I came back some time later, it had made it to the Windows logon screen.  Rebooting again, it again appeared to be stuck on the initial logo (I believe it to be the POST), but again, eventually (after I got tired of watching and walked away) made it to the windows logon.  Logging onto the computer was then normal, and no errors were reported to Windows.  I checked the device manager, and all hardware appeared normal, but every single boot now takes several minutes (I finally managed the patience to sit in front of it with a timer, and it takes 7 and a half minutes, showing the initial boot logo all the way until getting the windows logon screen, with no BIOS screen and no windows loading spinny thing...).  I ran the windows built in memory test utility, and it did two passes with no errors.

I believe that it recently did the Windows 2020H2 update (it never offered the 2004 update from last year), but given that the BIOS screen doesn't act normally I don't really believe it to be related (unless someone else knows something different).

Any ideas as to what might be the issue?

Mike

ETA:  Checked and I am still on the 1909 version, so no update to 2004 or 20H2  Not offered as an option on the windows update setting (Home version)

I would update the bios first.
What happens if you go to the boot screen and force it to boot off of the boot drive? Does it boot windows instantly?

Also you can force the 20H2 feature update buy downloading and running the "media creation tool" on MS website.

There is a setting in windows to scroll through and show the boot software. It's about 4 thousand lines of files accessed.

"Boot Logging" is the activity:
https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-disable-boot-log-windows/

My Asus had the exact same problem a long time ago (windows 7 what is yours?) that came from a graphic driver update.  It wasn't fixable.  It would hang on a few *.SYS files that were graphics.  It would always boot, but it took 5 minutes or so.

I decided to trash it and use it as a secondary laptop and wiped the whole thing and restored to factory reset and the problem went away.  Subsequent windows updates didn't cause it, but I have not updated the graphics driver again.

What you are looking at is the self loading boot loader part of windows, it hangs at a logo while the shit in the background happens.  The BIOS is a different animal and you can still get in by holding down F2 or DEL keys during cold boot.

If you are looking at this, then it's the operating system not BIOS causing the problem



This is bios: (or something like this)

Bad motherboard likely.  Happened in an Acer I had.  Warranty dept replaced the motherboard.

Try booting from a Linux live disk.

If you have boot from USB enabled and there's a non-bootable flash drive plugged in that can also cause OP's situation to happen.

Have you loaded defaults in your bios yet?

Sorry, I thought I had already written in a post on that - I did set the BIOS defaults early in the process, to no change in behavior.

I burned a UNIX Live CD per a comment above, and for some reason it wouldn't load all the way.  It DID, however, quickly move off the original BIOS screen, so I decided that there was something screwy with the disk drive after all.  I ran SFC, which detected and corrected some corrupt files, but had no change in the slow boot.  So I finally downloaded a new install of Windows 10.  This morning I removed the secondary hard drive and used the installation media to nuke all of the partitions on the m.2 drive, and let it start over from scratch.  Now I have the 20H2 version running (no apparent problems with the existing hardware) with pretty much nothing else installed.  I guess I'll see if it runs smoothly for a while and then put back whatever I decide I need, as I primarily use it when traveling - my main pc is a desktop that I built about 8 years ago.  That one could also do with some work, to include probably throwing the whole thing out and starting from scratch, but good parts are hard to find right now, especially graphics.

Thanks all for the suggestions and tips.

Mike