Windows 10 Pro 64 has begun hanging on a scheduled restart. It only hangs on a scheduled restart in the morning. I have the machine set up to reboot itself every morning before I get to my desk. When I get to my desk the monitor shows the "Restarting" display with the circling dots. It never gets to an actual reboot and I have to power cycle it with the physical power button.
If I manually run the scheduled restart at any other time by selecting "Run" on the scheduled task, it reboots normally. If I reboot by selecting "Restart" in the normal controls (main menu or other such as the Ultimate Windows Tweaker context menu) it reboots normally.
If I change the restart schedule to 3 minutes into the future, then sit back and wait to watch it, the scheduled task triggers correctly and the system reboots normally.
There is nothing in the system logs in Event Viewer that would indicate what the problem is. When I physically push and hold the power button to shut down, then push the power button again to restart -- There is no "computer shut down unexpectedly" or any such entry.
There is no "dirty disk" flag set either. Just to be sure there's no disk corruption involved I've run disk check with the fix flags (/v /f /r) set several times. The disk check does not find anything wrong. So I'm thinking it's a clean shutdown and Windows has done everything except power cycle the machine.
There is nothing in the Microsoft Windows Diagnostics Performance logs to indicate what the problem might be.
I run the DISM Scanhealth and SFC /scannow functions every day and they don't indicate any problems. It's very rare that SFC finds a problem and even rarer that DISM indicates an integrity issue. When it does I always run Restorehealth and SFC until it indicates no integrity violations and then reboot immediately. Then check again to be sure the image and system file issue is resolved.
Windows Update is working correctly and all available updates and patches are installed.
I've tried all the settings in the scheduled task properties under "Configure for". The results are the same, it still hangs on the restarting screen.
When it fails in this manner, the power light is on steady and the drive light is on steady. I've watched both command reboots and this scheduled reboot failure. During a command reboot the drive light flickers and flashes and the system reboots. During this failed scheduled reboot the drive flickers and flashes then locks on steady and stays there. That might be a clue but if so I can't figure out to what.
I've tried disconnecting/powering off the several USB drives attached to the machine. No difference.
There are 16 drives with a total of 41-TB of combined storage. S.M.A.R.T indicates no problems with any drives. As soon as I see an incipient drive failure I replace the drive, usually with a bigger one.
All drives except the root (system, C:) drive are configured for default quick removal policy. C:\ is an SSD and set to better performance policy. There is a clone of C:\ that I refresh every week in case something goes wrong with my root drive. I can boot from either one. It doesn't matter which I boot from, the issue remains the same. Which simply means that if this is a software issue I've backed up the problem to the clone too and if it's a hardware issue it would behave the same with either boot disk.
I've tried reinstalling all the ACPI drivers in the System Devices tree of Device Manager.
All the motherboard BIOS controls related to ACPI and APM are set to on. I've tried changing and disabling all those and the RTC power on settings in the BIOS and that makes no difference.
The machine is configured to run a backup of the root drive with Paragon Hard Disk Manager. This is the only thing that happens overnight that is not happening during the day (other than routine update checks and installs) when I am using the system normally. That backup has plenty of time to finish before the scheduled restart activates and backup is always successful so far. This has been configured for years and was never an issue previously.
I've tried backing up to a different disk, both a system attached SATA connected disk (mechanical and SSD) and USB connected disks. No difference.
The machine has 4 hot-swap SATA drive bays. It doesn't make any difference if they are all on, all off, all populated, none are populated or any combination thereof. The BIOS is set to capture INT 19 for the option ROM of the card that serves those bays. It doesn't matter if that is on or off either.
If I pause the scheduled restart and manually do a normal restart when I get to my desk everything works as expected. If I manually activate the scheduled task and run it, everything works as expected.
I've tried running a scheduled restart by other means, such as SplinterWare System Scheduler. That makes no difference either.
Very, very rarely the system will execute a scheduled restart properly. Rarely as in maybe three times in the last two months. Of course every time that happens I think I've found and fixed the problem. Then have the same failure the next morning.
Unless the system is in the restart hang condition it will shutdown and restart normally every time except as described. It is completely unresponsive in the restart hang and must be physically power cycled at that point.
Naturally I've tried removing all power to the machine so the caps are fully drained and that makes no difference either.
It seems to me like there's something that is preventing a successful restart only under a specific set of conditions that only occurs overnight. I've combed through the system logs for hours and can't find what that might be.
It's not a super big deal to just power cycle the machine every morning but that sort of defeats the purpose of having a freshly booted system waiting for me when I get to my desk. So it's irritating me greatly and I'm vexed that things aren't working as they should. This has become a minor obsession that I find very frustrating, the machine just should not be exhibiting this behavior. Being a bit geeky I like my stuff to work the way it's supposed to.
I've been running a scheduled restart for years with no problem. Like since Windows 7 or maybe even earlier. It's been doing this for a couple months and I've been trying to find the problem all that time. Everything works properly except the scheduled restart, in the morning, at 05:30. I give up. Maybe someone here can help or at least point me in a direction I have not thought of.
EDIT- I forgot to mention that I did an OS repair install overlay very early on in the presentation of this problem. The system has a fresh install thereby.
A clean install from bare metal is not an option. That's an act of desperation not a fix. I want to fix this, not go through hours (more like days) of setting up a machine that other than this issue is working perfectly. It would be very nice to get this fixed because it is sub-optimal to not have my fresh reboot in the morning. It's not so sub-optimal that I'm going to go through all that trouble to fix it. This is a challenge and it has me stumped. If it's a challenge that someone else knows how to meet that would be great. I'd love to learn something new in the process.