Forum Discussion
Slow Boot - dxgkrnl.sys Not Loading
I know. This has been seen before. I can find the issue all over, but can't seem to find a solution that works for me.
This is on a fresh install of Windows 11. It takes about 4 minuets before I can log in, another minuet to get into the desktop, and another minuet before the taskbar loads. At this point I feel like I can start trying to do things, but everything is still VERY slow for several minuets.
Windows is up to date
I did have a few drivers in device manager that were not found, but that has been taken care of. I honestly don't remember which ones. It's been months.
My boot log has dxgkrnl.sys not loading 6 times. It does load before all the failed loads. Don't know if that means anything. WdFilter.sys is also not loaded once. It does also load before not loading.
My system log shows;
TPM-WMI
Service Control Manager
OneCore-DeviceAssociationService.
I don't think these are part of the issue as my other Windows 11 PC has the same errors present and is quite snappy. I could definitely be wrong here.
I have tried running SFC /scannow and Repair-WindowsImage -Online -RestoreHealth in the shell. Both reported no errors. Which is what I would expect on a fresh install.
I ran Display Driver Uninstaller then installed Nvidia and Intel drivers manually.
Finally I ran Snappy Driver Installer Origin.
Nothing has had an affect.
My system:
ASRock z370 pro4/oem
I7-8700K
16GB RAM
Nvidia GTX 980-ti
Windows is running on a 500GB HDD
I know... not an SSD. I have several PCs running Linux and Windows on both HDDs and SSDs. The HDD boot times are noticeably slower, but this one is WAY slower.
My next step was going to be a fresh install of Windows 10, then maybe upgrade to 11. After that, replace the motherboard. Hoping to avoid this.
Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.
6 Replies
This is the primary error you're experiencing. dxgkrnl.sys is the kernel-mode driver for the DirectX graphics component. Its failure is likely causing the slow boot times. There's no clear solution for this issue, as it's usually related to a specific hardware or driver configuration.
Thats crazy that there's no fix for this. So until Microsoft addresses the issue this pc can never run Windows? Since I see posts about this going back several years, it seems Microsoft doesn't really care. That's sad, but that's the mentality of these huge corporations I guess.
Oh well. Thanks anyways.
So I did another clean install, because why not, it doesn't really take that long. Again with the wi-fi disabled, but this time with the GPU removed. Integrated graphics only. No Windows updates with the wi-fi disabled, and no change. Enabled wi-fi, ran snappy driver installer origin. Still no change. At this point it has got to be some incompatibility with a motherboard driver.
Either way, I'm done. This thing has been down for months and sucked up WAY to much of my time. I'm clearly out of my league here, and not getting any help on any forums. I reinstalled Linux and all is right with the world again. If I ever regain my patience, and cough up the money to replace the motherboard, maybe I'll give it another shot... probably not. lol
Do I smell bad or something? lol. I doubt I've "stumped" the internet. I have this issue posed on other forums, all with exactly zero responses. Never had that happen before.
Anyway, I found this interesting. I updated my bios, then disabled my wi-fi and did another fresh install of windows 10 (it seems to be the faster of the two). I disabled all updates (especially driver updates), turned my wi-fi back on and installed the Nvidia drivers for my GTX 980ti. Same issue. I was convinced this had something to do with my motherboard intel drivers. I think next I will try a fresh install without installing ANY display drivers and see what happens, then maybe a fresh install with a GTX 970 I have lying around.
Maybe I'm diving down the wrong rabbit hole, I don't know. I'm about at the end of my knowledge here. I will keep posting little updates in the hopes that someone sees this.
Just a quick update. I did try a fresh install of Windows 10. Same issue. The boot does seem to be a couple minuets faster, but this is still pretty bad. Without any further assistance, I think the next step would be replacing the motherboard, but that's not really in the budget. I think if I can't get this resolved in the next week or two I will cut my losses and go back to Linux, which was running fine prior to Windows 11. I was moving this machine to Windows for some software compatibility.
I don't know if there's a point in replying to a post a year after the fact, but I wanted to provide some information to those who are struggling with this issue of an (apparently) super slow CPU during bootup. The reason I'm posting here is because this is the only post I could find that accurately describes the symptoms that I observed on my laptop (vs. a general explanation that CPU slowdowns are caused by having too many background processes, etc.). But in my case, the issue is intermittent ... and when it happens, it can be so bad that I get a watchdog violation 0x133 (so I can compare successful bootups with normal CPU vs. successful bootups with slow CPU vs. failed bootups). Note that even if my laptop manages to bootup successfully despite a slow CPU, that slowness is permanent = doesn't eventually go away by itself (i.e. can only be resolved by rebooting and hoping for the best).
For reference, I have an Acer Aspire 5 A515-44-R41B running Windows 11.
Now I should warn people that I'm just a casual user (i.e. non-techie). My laptop is 5 years old and has been working fine for years. However, I started noticing this issue of slow bootups months ago ... but it has progressively been getting much worse (i.e. more frequent) over the past few weeks. Due to this gradual degradation, my first thought was that my hardware is failing. But whenever I ran diagnostics (e.g. on memory, SSD, corruption of Windows system files), there were never any problems. Then I also ran down the rabbit hole of thinking that it was driver related (e.g. disconnected all USB peripherals, disabled all non-Windows services and startup processes) ... but the issue did not go away.
So then I turned on logging of the bootup (via ntbtlog.txt). I (too) see multiple "dxgkrnl.sys not loaded" messages (after a successful load), BUT this always happens ... for me at least (i.e. for normal bootups as well as failed bootups). As such, it doesn't seem to be the root cause (for me). Furthermore, if I compare the various instances of watchdog violations (i.e. blue screen of death), the ntbtlog (abruptly) ends at different locations ... which suggests the CPU is simply running so slow that it is unable to complete the bootup process (i.e. quits randomly per watchdog timer).
At this point, I was not going to attempt a reinstallation of Windows (etc.) ... so the only other thing I could do (that affects the initial bootup) was fiddle with the BIOS (i.e. process of elimination). In my case, disabling the AMD virtualization settings (i.e. AMD-SVM, AMD-IOMMU) seems to help (i.e. no issues over the past week, where I normally turn my laptop on and off several times a day ... and the bootup consistently only takes a few seconds now). Of course, the issue was intermittent to begin with ... so it's hard to say anything conclusive (i.e. I'm just crossing my fingers now). Searching the internet does seem to indicate that an "incompatibility between AMD virtualization and Windows 11" is a real thing. So did this issue correspond to my upgrade from Windows 10 to 11? Could be, but ...
Anyways, that whole story was just to say the "dxgkrnl.sys issue" could be a red herring when it comes to resolving the aforementioned super slow CPU during bootup (… regardless of whether those BIOS settings are the true root cause of my problem or not).
