Startup/Shutdown problems

Im having some problems logging off and booting up. When I shut down my PC, either by manually holding the power button 3-5 sec or through Start>Turn Off Computer, it hangs up for about 15-20 seconds on the blue log off screen before it powers down. It does this same thing on restart as well..(basically anytime I power down the computer). Sometimes the PC will completely shut down while the blue log off screen remains on monitor for another 5-10 seconds. Then it will go away when the monitor goes in its low power state.

It also stalls at the Windows splash screen while the loading bar continued for over 10 min before I finally held the power button down to restart the boot. Of course the screen came up and displayed it didnt fully boot up on last boot...do this...do that...blah blah blah. I didnt do last good config because I wanted to see if it would do it again. I rebooted in normal mode and it went through successfully at what seemed to be avg boot-up speed. It doesnt do this on restart but usually when computer is completely powered down over night then restarted in the morning.

Here is what I have done in the past few days that I think may have caused some of these problems:

-Set up an External HDD for the first time. (WD My Book).
-Accidentally compressed C: drive on disk cleanup. But uncompressed afterwards. (dont know if this worked, but I did it)
-Accidentally turned the WD External to active after I formatted from FAT32/NTFS. ( I know I screw up everything...lol) But what I did was delete the External partition and started over by formatting it again. It removed the Active status.
-Also, not within the last couple days, but for some time I have had some shutdown/start up registry tweaks to items like AutoEndTask, WaitToKillService, etc.

I want to say it has something to do with the EHDD I hooked up. Not the fact that I switched it from active on back over to inactive, but just the device itself. I have used the external and files transfer successfully and it seems to work fine. All drivers and firmware are up to date via WD support site. One thing I have done to eliminate hang up time is to stop the External device when I reboot or power down, even though it has the SmartPower feature on it. I think it has made some difference but whats all the bootup problems about then?

 

Can you completely remove the external drive before shutting down and see if the issues still occur? If they do, then the problem is probably with your registry tweaks.

 

What do you mean completely remove? As in uninstall drivers and the whole nine?

I have had these reg tweaks from some time and never had an issue. All of a sudden when I get an EHD it starts to have problems....Doesnt sound coincidental to me.

I have stopped/disabled the drivers and unplugged the power source from the external to completely stop the external disk from running and to not start on startup. When I do that it doesnt seem to hang up on the log off screen. Now the bootup is hit or miss. Usually even with the external hooked up on RESTART it WONT hang up on the Windows "splash" bootup screen. Only seems to do it on turn off.

I want to bet money it has something to do with the button manager driver WD uses. It doesnt work as fast as my PC does when it shuts down and starts up. My computer also wont recognize the external on restart/boot up. And thats when you leave all the drivers enabled and running. Which is how its supposed to be.

BTW I have been talking with WD about this and like most companies tech support, you get nowhere.

 

You are correct, this sounds a lot like the drive at fault.

Just for clarification, I just meant for you to unplug the drive from the computer on boot up, as you have already done.

Does the drive work how you want it to without the drivers?

Have you attempted to reinstall the drivers?

Can you test using the "Safely remove hardware" icon to remove the drive before shutting down the computer?

 

Ive uninstalled everything and reinstalled drivers, firmware...etc via Western Digital website. Per WD everything is current.

As far as stopping the device before restarting or shutdown down I usually always do that as it seems to not hang up on the log off screen while my PC itself has already shut down. Though, the hangup time for restarting it still far longer than should be. So I dont know if it makes a difference. Maybe on shut down. The thing about doing it that way is, on startup my computer doesnt always recognize the external hard drive. I have to unplug and then replug. Even with drivers set to automatic.

Either way that defeats the purpose of that button manager. The WD My Book drives have the smart power feature. The purpose of that is to handle the power state in sync with you PC power button. If its not shutting down like my pc would normally shut down its internal disks, then the fancy little feature isnt much good. It needs to be handled manually. But like I said, even with me doing it manually, not only is it a lengthy annoyance to stop and unplug everything then start and replug, I still face the issue of my PC not recognizing the device everytime.

Thanks for you help.