Lately, when booting my PC, it would crash and freeze on the first attempt, but then reboot and work fine after that.

This problem started after I had upgraded my PC to the Windows 10 Preview, so I naturally attributed this behavior to a bug in the pre-release software or some driver issues related with that. Fair enough … since it’s pre-release software. But still, after a while this behavior started to annoy me and I switched back to Windows 8.1.

But then - to my horror – this problem still occurred with Windows 8.1! So I did what I usually do in these situations:

• Fire up WinDbg …
• … analyze the Mini-Dumps in the Windows directory …
• … and find out it’s the graphics drivers fault.

Even though it was the graphics drivers fault (the crash happened in atikmdag.sys) none of the usual steps helped this time. I removed the driver, installed it again, rolled back to an earlier version of it, even tried out a beta-version. Nothing!

I was searching back and forth tech sites, forums and message boards and came across dozens of useless tips and “solutions” to this issue. I was even desperate enough to run some driver cleaner software on my system (which wreaked even more havoc, but this will be another blog post). Until finally, I noticed a short suggestion in some forum:

… you might want to turn off Windows 8’s fast boot feature.

Well, this would actually explain the observed behavior on my machine:

• Windows performs a fast boot, the driver crashes for some reason.
• Windows reboots: only this time in “normal” mode and everything is fine.
• That is, until shutdown and the next fast boot …
  
  

So, I went into Control Panel – Power Options.

Clicked Change settings that are currently unavailable hyperlink.

There, I disabled the Turn on fast startup checkbox.

I rebooted my PC and no problems whatsoever anymore!

Turns out, my graphics card driver does not play well with that (otherwise really useful) Fast Boot feature of Windows 8 so it will stay deactivated for now. Actually this should be no big problem and I can take a couple of few extra seconds when booting my desktop PC. After all this is still faster than booting, crashing and rebooting …