Windows10 / extremly slow during startup

[Schultz IT Solutions]

Hello VeraCrypt team,
I am using VC for many years now without any issues - thank you for that!

I now upgraded my laptop (LENOVO W530 with 20GB Ram and a recent 450GM SSD) from Windows7 to Windows10. On the old OS, I had no issues at all with the startup speed. but since my upgrade, it is simply unbearable:
AFTER VeryCrypt verified the password (takes about 2,5 minutes, which is OK), Windows10 begins to startup. However this is just crazy: it takes more than 30 minutes(!), before windows allows me to enter username/password. This behaviour was defenitly not the case with Windows7, so I am pretty sure it is a combination of "Windows10 AND Veracrypt".
Once the system is running, I do not recogize any "on-the-fly" delays.

Any ideas?
kind regards
Ruediger Schultz

[Gary Marks]

Well Ruediger, I'm not part of the VeraCrypt team, but I am a longtime user, and I'd be going nuts with the wait times you are enduring. For the sake of comparison, I'm using a nearly decade-old quad-core AMD-based computer running Windows 10 v1903 on a modest SSD. I use a 26-character password and a single-digit PIM, and my password authentication and boot times are orders of magnitude quicker than yours. My password/PIM authenticates in slightly more than a second, and I see the Windows 10 password screen in another 22 seconds. But here's one issue that jumps out at me from your description... it's that your password authentication takes 2.5 minutes. The odd thing is that while the password is being authenticated, Windows hasn't even begun to load because it is on an encrypted partition, so any slowdown since you upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10 would seem to be unrelated to the OS. Am I missing something?

[Schultz IT Solutions]

Thanks Gary for your feedback. Let me clarify my situation as well:

My password is 20 chars long and NO PIM. I just a few days ago migrated from Windows7 to Windows10 (an inplace Upgrade). Before that migration my "VeraCrypt password verification" always took about two minutes, but then Windows7 would start up within seconds (same as yours). During the normal work, I did not (and also do not now) expirience ANY kind of delay.

I use a "paranoia" (three level) encryption, so I was quite content with the duration of the password verification (I infact appreciated this behaviour as it would further protect against brute-force decryption attempts).

So I still do not mind the two minutes of VC password verification, but Windows10 is unbearably slow in the startup process (compared with my windows7 installation). The OS is not frozen at any time, but simply is VERY slow:

One full circle of those five or six white dots (during the startup ) takes up to one minute (I can observe every single of those dots appear and disappear during this...)

So my conclusion is: Windows10 needs far more resources (Processor cycles or memory) than Windows7 did... But then again, I do have lots of memory available (20GB).

I am unsure "where to go from here". I defenitly need the disk encrypted, and I do not want to use BitLocker either.

If this behaviour is unique to my environment, I will have to find a way around it or live with it...
but if other Windows10 users expirience similar behaviours, maybe the VC team can put some resources into investigating this issue???

thanks again for your response
Ruediger

[Schultz IT Solutions]

Hello all,
I like to come back to this issue, as there has been some changes (which actually solved the problem).

As I stated in the original post, I did an "inline-upgrade" from Win7 to Win10 (with decrypting the system partition first of course). This "inline-upgrade" resulted in unbearable startup times (25 to 45 minutes!)

However, in early may I had to restore the current Win10 system (due to some unrelated circumstances). This lead to a massive improvement in startup times (5 to 10 minutes, but still very slow...)

I now reluctantly decided to do a clean Win10 install on the very same hardware, and "heureka", the issue with veracrypt "miracoulusly disappeared".
current startup times are very much OK again (45 seconds for VeraCrypt password check, and less than 1 minute for Windows startup).

So whatever the underlying issue was, it seems to be related to the inline-migration from Win7 to Win10 on a heavyly used system.

kind regards
Ruediger Schultz