Raspberry Pi 2 hangs during Windows IoT boot

Question

I've downloaded the Windows 10 IoT Core Dashboard and set up an SD card according to the instructions on that site. When booting my Raspberry Pi 2 from the SD card the Windows logo shows up with the spinning balls below.

After a while, the Windows logo disappears, the spinning balls continue to spin for some seconds, then they freeze up looking like in the attached image below.

However, it seems that Windows isn't completely frozen because I can ping the RPi and access the Windows Device Portal on port 8080, although it is very slow and I can't start any of the demonstration apps (even "Hello World").

Another thing to note is that the device name and password I set in Dashboard has not been set, as "My Devices" in Dashboard shows the default device name ("minwinpc") and I must use the default password ("p@ssw0rd") to log on to the Device Portal.

So it seems that some Windows services are started, but not everything since the circles hang during boot and I don't get the default view.

I'm running from a class 10 SD card, and my power supply can deliver up to 2.4A, so it doesn't seem like there should be a problem with either of these.

How can I have my RPi2 start Windows Iot properly?

Answer 1

It seems to be a problem with the Windows IoT build I was using. When I changed over to the latest Insider Preview, Windows started booting again.

However, on every boot I received a 0xc000014c warning about corrupt boot sector (or something along those lines). I just left it at that screen for about a minute (maybe two), then Windows continued and started up correctly. I occasionally had the same issue with the latest regular release as well, so that specific issue was not preview specific.

Answer 2

I have a raspberry pi 2 as well. My sd card is a sandisk 32gb model. I have noticed windows iot 15063 and earlier preferred 16 gb sd cards from kingston. Later builds prefer 32 gb sd cards. Trouble booting still happens on insider builds (>17104), even with the 32 gb disk, so unfortunately you have to have several sd cards handy trying to boot from each one. Once you find one is working (by viewing the device portal) then it is stable and won't give you problems again. Another thing to try is to hard reboot it in 15 minite intervals, but No more than 3 times. My last suggestion would be to upgrade to a raspberry pi 3 as i have not heard of the same issue happening on that hardware. All of this is difficult to rationalize and troubleshoot and im afraid its because of some post-setup processing related to windows store integration or windows update that normally works seamlessly on a windows desktop pc but still hasnt had been fixed on windows iot running on raspberry pi 2 for over 3 years now. Thus you may see a division between microsofts paid software and free.