Windows 10 Pro boot hang (before POST)

[Auggie]

Experiencing a high incident rate of Windows 10 Pro hanging immediately upon boot before it POSTs (black screen with non-blinking underscore cursor). It happens almost all the time, but after a forced stop, it subsequently starts up successfully.

 

And this is with a brand new install with no third party or other applications installed yet.  I used the latest virtual drivers available through unRAID's VM management tools.  Only 1 CPU is assigned, out of a possible 2.

 

And a first: While drafting this post, it just hanged at the blue Windows logo screen after restarting during it's first Windows update process.  I initiated the Windows Update again, which upon the typical restart to continue updating, it went straight to the frozen underscore cursor screen.  Since it always hangs during startup, I can't get a proper Windows update installed because I have to force the VM to stop, after which when I finally successfully get it to startup it rolls back any updates to the previous version.  This is really unacceptable for me as I require reliable unattended operations (I've set it to auto-logon).

 

Curious if anyone else is experiencing this issue, and if so, what solutions may have worked to resolved this.  So far, this does not bode well in my first VM foray with Win10 as I need a stable VM that will reliably boot and operate.

 

I only intend to run custom software that I've created to manage my media library jukebox, so I'm willing to downgrade to Windows 7 if that offers the stability and reliability I need and this is not an unRAID VM issue specific to any OS...