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Good day, I am the owner of a used m18x r2 struggling to build it back up into a functional machine. The previous user had his system installed in RAID mode which won't suffice for my desired SSD boot speeds. I've ensured that both AHCI and UEFI are active in the A11 BIOS. I have also ensured to clean the main drive via diskpart CMD upon custom installing my copy of Win 7 Ultimate. Oddly enough, when the setup completes, I'll get an error message stating windows can't finish configuring and needs to restart. Heeding this message will only cause it to happen again on the next reboot, so CMD to the rescue and creating and off to making user account I go. Unfortunately, boot speeds are as slow as ever and I've verified that no RAID controllers have been left installed in the device manager. So far, my only potential lead is that I've noticed during each boot, Windows mentions that "Setup Is Updating Registry Settings" after about of minute of Starting Windows. I've been researching this exact string but I can't say I've found a concrete solution to attempt just yet. So here I am, requesting for advice as to what I should check next. Thanks in advance! EDIT: I've tried out a new install accessing the CD through legacy but still keeping the SDD Boot drive on UEFI mode. So far haven't had to mess with CMD anymore to proceed nor has the Setup needed to Update Registry Settings. I also remembered to install the intel rapid storage driver. Alas, I'm still left with 2 minute boot times(particularly on the Starting Windows screen), so the problem still remains. EDIT2: Diagnosing with a Boot Manager, I discovered it takes about a minute before svchost even starts running. So with that, I ruled out it wasn't a software problem. I then decided on the possibility that maybe the other drives could be interfering with booting. Pulling out the other HDDs had no effect, but the actual culprit was the mSATA SSD that was left in from the last user. Now I can enter windows in 3 seconds! Even fishier, this mSATA drive says its 32 GB but Speccy says its a 1GB drive. But that's a problem for another time, at last my 850 EVO is showing off its expecting speeds.

Is there a reason why an i5, 8GB ram laptop would take 10-20 minutes to boot up? The HDD passed DTS, no SMART errors, and the windows error checking found nothing, RAM has no issues, tested in a separate laptop. The system was restored from a Recovery partition (i.e. the OS partition was overwritten), same results, takes forever to boot up, granted the HDD is a 5400 rpm with barely any cache, but still it should not take that long, it booted just fine in the past... Bios? Some weird corrupt Recovery partition?