Troubleshooting driver issues when the computer stops during OSD when booting with the infamous circle showing or nothing at all showing is a big challenge. With all the modern 2-in-1 devices and devices using USB-C docking stations I have seen this a couple of times the last month.
One option that at least gives us an idea of which driver it is that actually causes this is to enable Boot logging, which has been around a while now. Boot logging can be manually activated using MSconfig as shown below. It can also be enabled using command line “bcdedit.exe /set {current} bootlog Yes”
It gives us a log file, C:\Windows\ntbtlog.txt with all the drivers loaded during boot. It will also log drivers that failed to load, so if it freezes or stops the boot process we can at least see what driver it loaded as the last one. The log file is not overwritten it will append to the log file.
Enabling it during OS deployment is really simple, just a command line to enable it directly after the Setup Windows and Configuration Manager step and then we add reboot for it to take effect.
It is not perfect but can be helpful when troubleshooting boot/reboot issues during OS deployment.
Nice post Jörgen – where does the log file get saved to?
Hi,
Good point! added it to the post! Thanks for the feedback!
/Jörgen