Help with long Windows 7 load time with lingering black screen

[Alan Lebetkin]

Looking for help diagnosing a long Windows 7 start-up time on dual-boot MacBook Pros using rEFInd, imaged via DeployStudio workflow. My organization uses a complicated workflow and I'm sure some processes can be simplified to fix this problem. Here is the workflow:

1. Create a Mac OSX master on one laptop and install rEFInd on the Mac HD volume root
2. On a separate laptop, install Bootcamp and create a Windows 7 64-bit master on a Bootcamp partition
3. Create OSX and Windows masters from the two different laptops using DeployStudio (note: Windows is not sysprepped. I support OSX and am not sure if this decision impacts our problem. Would appreciate any insight.)
4. Drop the OSX and Windows masters into one DeployStudio workflow
5. Image a new dual-boot laptop with OSX as startup volume. After imaging, bless rEFInd and restart
6. From rEFInd startup screen, boot into Windows

THE PROBLEM: The first time booting into Windows takes 5-10 minutes with the system lingering at a black screen. After getting to Windows desktop, the system is unresponsive for another 5-10 minutes while installing Bootcamp drivers. After drivers are installed and on subsequent restarts, Windows loads at a faster pace. It's acceptable but not great, and definitely slower than the load time on the Windows master laptop.

MY QUESTIONS: Why is it re-installing Bootcamp drivers after cloning? They were already installed on the master image. Does merging a Bootcamp partition master with an OSX partition master that did not have Bootcamp installed affect this? Is it a sysprep issue? Can I eliminate rEFInd boot loaders as the source of the slowness? Is DeployStudio a factor? Is there a simpler way to create a dual-boot master?

Thank you

[Roderick W. Smith]

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with DeployStudio, and my knowledge of Windows-specific issues is also limited. I do know that Windows tends to be very fussy about its hardware -- it records information on the computer on which it's running (including serial numbers and similar information), and if that changes, it can take a long time to update it. This probably explains your long delays and re-installation of drivers on the initial boot. As to the longer boot times on your cloned systems, I'm less sure. You might want to ask about this on a Windows forum, since this sounds like a very Windows-specific problem. (I can't rule out the possibility that rEFInd is launching Windows in a way that makes it susceptible to such problems, but that's not where I'd start looking for the cause.)