Home » How To » How to Enable Boot Logging in Windows 10 (& Disable Boot Log)

How to Enable Boot Logging in Windows 10 (& Disable Boot Log)

To know what is starting and loading at Windows startup, you can enable Boot logging. Here’re the steps to enable boot logging in Windows.

When you start Windows, it automatically loads and unloads several different software, applications, and drives as and when needed. This loading and unloading help Windows run your hardware and software as expected. However, there will be times when one or more of these boot-time drivers or software are causing problems. In those cases, logging Windows boot events lets your troubleshooting process that much easier.

Thankfully, enabling boot logging in Windows 10 is much easier than you think. In fact, there are several different ways to enable boot logging feature in Windows 10. I will show two of those methods. Follow the method of your choice.

Jump to:

1] Enable Boot Logging from MSConfig

Though kind of hard to find, Windows has a neat little option to enable boot logging. All you have to do is select a checkbox and reboot the system to see the boot log.

1. The msconfig tool is nothing but the System Configuration tool. To open it, press Win + R. In the Run dialog box, type “msconfig” and click on the “Ok” button.

2. As soon as you click the button, the system configuration tool will be opened. In this window, go to the “Boot” tab, select the “Boot log” checkbox and click on the “Ok” button.

Windows-boot-loggin-events-msconfig-tool

3. The above action will save the change and shows a prompt asking if you want to restart the system. Click on the “Restart” button.

Windows-boot-loggin-events-select-restart

4. After rebooting the system, you can find the boot log in the below location. To make things easier, copy the path, paste it in the Run dialog box and press Enter. The boot log will be opened in your default text editor.

C:\Windows\ntbtlog.txt

Windows-boot-loggin-events-boot-log-in-text-editor

Once you are done with the boot log, you can disable it by following the same steps but unchecking the “Boot log” checkbox in step 2.

2] Command Prompt Method

As an alternative, you can also use the commands to enable and disable boot logging. This is especially useful if you are creating your own scripts.

1. First, open the start menu, search for “Command Prompt”, right-click on it and select “Run as Administrator” option. This action will open an elevated Command Prompt window.

2. After opening the Command Prompt window, the first thing you need is the identifier. To know the operating system identifier, execute bcdedit command.

3. You might see multiple Windows Boot Loader listings. Find the boot loader section with the description “Windows 10”. You can find the identifier right next to “Identifier”. In my case, the identifier is “{current}”. For the most part, your’s will be “{current}” too.

Windows-boot-loggin-events-identifier

4. Once you have the identifier, execute the below command. If your identifier is different, replace “{current}” with your identifier.

bcdedit /set {current} bootlog yes
Windows-boot-loggin-events-execute-command

5. Now, restart the system to log the boot events. You can find the boot log at the below location.

C:\Windows\ntbtlog.txt

Windows-boot-loggin-events-boot-log-in-text-editor

To disable boot logging, execute the below command. As you can see from the command, all we did is replace “yes” with “no”.

bcdedit /set {current} bootlog no

That is all. It is that simple to disable or enable boot logging in Windows 10. I hope that helps. If you are stuck or need some help, comment below and I will try to help as much as possible.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top