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I've got an odd problem with Windows 8.1 booting. Sometimes, it will stop at the swirling dots and hang indefinitely. (I've left it there as long as 30 minutes.)
I've discovered an odd workaround: I turn off the machine and unplug the drives from my Areca ARC-1220 RAID card. (I have four 2TB drives in RAID5 for 6.0 TB of sotrage. This 6 TB volume is mounted as drive F:.) Then, I boot the machine agian. Windows enters auto repair, and I allow it to do so. It reboots to my desktop after completing auto repair.
At that point, I hot-plug the four drives into the controller. The Areca card recognizes them and mounts the F: drive, and everything's fine again. At this point, I can usually reboot with the drives attached without any problem at all. But the problem will occur again later; a few reboots.
I can't find anything in the Windows logs; I think whatever's going wrong is happening too early and Windows isn't yet logging anything. I've run a CHKDSK on the F: drive and it has no problems:
Is there a permanent fix? What causes this issue?
I've discovered an odd workaround: I turn off the machine and unplug the drives from my Areca ARC-1220 RAID card. (I have four 2TB drives in RAID5 for 6.0 TB of sotrage. This 6 TB volume is mounted as drive F:.) Then, I boot the machine agian. Windows enters auto repair, and I allow it to do so. It reboots to my desktop after completing auto repair.
At that point, I hot-plug the four drives into the controller. The Areca card recognizes them and mounts the F: drive, and everything's fine again. At this point, I can usually reboot with the drives attached without any problem at all. But the problem will occur again later; a few reboots.
I can't find anything in the Windows logs; I think whatever's going wrong is happening too early and Windows isn't yet logging anything. I've run a CHKDSK on the F: drive and it has no problems:
Code:
F:\>chkdsk
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is RAID5 4x2TB.
WARNING! F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.
Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...
125440 file records processed.
File verification completed.
5687 large file records processed.
0 bad file records processed.
Stage 2: Examining file name linkage ...
137060 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
0 unindexed files scanned.
0 unindexed files recovered.
Stage 3: Examining security descriptors ...
Security descriptor verification completed.
5810 data files processed.
Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems.
No further action is required.
5721915 MB total disk space.
4364462 MB in 86469 files.
35800 KB in 5812 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
370767 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
1389626240 KB available on disk.
4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
1464810495 total allocation units on disk.
347406560 allocation units available on disk.Is there a permanent fix? What causes this issue?