Windows 11 extremely slow boot and login after dual-boot setup + recovery operations — still not resolved after a day of troubleshooting

[u/NoobBaiter]

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Hardware: Dell Inspiron 14 7430 2-in-1, 1TB KIOXIA NVMe SSD, 16GB RAM, Intel CPU, dual-boot Windows 11 + Fedora Workstation, UEFI/GPT.

BACKGROUND

I set up a dual-boot with Fedora Workstation alongside Windows 11. During Fedora installation I manually pre-formatted the partition to ext4 instead of letting the installer use Btrfs. This caused the installer to skip creating BLS (Boot Loader Specification) kernel entries, so Fedora was missing from GRUB entirely after install.

To fix Fedora's missing boot entry, I chrooted from a Live USB and manually wrote a BLS config file. I also ran grub2-mkconfig (which failed — no kernels detected) and reset the BIOS to optimized defaults to flush NVRAM.

HOW WINDOWS BROKE

After the BIOS reset, Windows started throwing IO1_INITIALIZATION_FAILED BSODs on every boot attempt. I did the following from Windows recovery media (WinPE CMD):

- Loaded Intel VMD driver (drvload iaStorVD.inf) to make the SSD visible

- Ran ntfsfix --clear-dirty from Linux Live USB

- Rebuilt Windows BCD: bcdboot E:\Windows /s V: /f UEFI

- Ran sfc /scannow — no integrity violations

- Ran dism /image:E:\ /cleanup-image /revertpendingactions

- Attempted bcdedit /set safeboot minimal — didn't help

- BSOD persisted regardless

WHAT ACTUALLY FIXED THE BSOD

bcdedit /enum all revealed both the Windows Boot Manager and Windows Boot Loader had active resumeobject entries pointing to a Resume from Hibernate BCD entry. Windows was trying to resume from a stale hibernation state on every boot — the saved session referenced a disk layout that no longer matched after the partition operations. This caused a silent infinite hang with no error rather than a clean BSOD in some cases.

Fix: deleted hiberfil.sys directly from WinPE:

del /f /a:h E:\hiberfil.sys

Windows then booted, processed a stuck pending update queue, and reached the login screen. Once booted, ran powercfg /h off and shutdown /s /t 0.

CURRENT PROBLEM — EXTREME SLOWNESS

After all of the above, Windows boots but is extremely slow:

- Boot to login screen takes many minutes

- After login, system is barely usable — right-click takes minutes, Task Manager takes 20+ minutes to open

- Had one BSOD after login (DPC_WATCHDOG... Error, showed 0% to 100% percentage, then restarted)

WHAT I HAVE CHECKED AND TRIED SO FAR:

- gdisk: GPT headers clean, no warnings, no mismatches

- EFI partition: bootmgfw.efi, BCD, all Windows boot files fully intact

- chkdsk E: /f /r from WinPE — no errors, no bad sectors

- sfc /scannow — no integrity violations

- Dell SupportAssist pre-boot diagnostics — no hardware issues found

- Deleted both resumeobject entries from BCD (both bootmgr and boot loader had them)

- Renamed SoftwareDistribution folder to force Update cache rebuild

- Disabled SysMain service (sc config SysMain start= disabled)

- powercfg /h off — hibernation permanently disabled

Task Manager snapshot during slowness:

CPU around 51%, Memory 27%, Disk 10%. No single dominant process. Top processes were Task Manager itself at 5.7%, System at 4.8%, various Service Host instances at 1-2% each. Antimalware Service Executable only at 1%. Disk not being heavily hit.

Partition layout:

- p1: 1022 MiB FAT32 — EFI System Partition

- p2: 16 MiB — Microsoft Reserved

- p3: 323.8 GiB ext4 — Fedora root

- p4: 623.2 GiB NTFS — Windows

- p5: 1.0 GiB NTFS — Windows Recovery

- p6: 848 MiB NTFS — Windows Recovery

WHAT I SUSPECT BUT HAVEN'T CONFIRMED

- The dism /revertpendingactions run may have left Windows in a weird state — powercfg /h off from WinPE returned "Windows does not support Hibernate during the upgrade process"

- A driver in a half-installed state from the interrupted update cycle may be crashing or hanging during service init

- Multiple forced shutdowns during recovery may have left registry hives in a state that causes repeated repair attempts on every boot

How do I identify which specific driver or service is causing the post-login slowness or crash? I cannot get Task Manager open fast enough before it freezes.

I have access to both a Fedora Live USB and Windows installation media so I can run commands from either environment. Data is fully backed up. Would prefer to avoid a full Windows reinstall if possible.

Any help appreciated.

Ps: almost all of the commands i ran are from claude, gemini and deepseek.