Thanks for the tips! I remember that when I was building the PC, it booted super fast. However, I enabled expo ONCE and from then on it was stuck booting super slowly. Not sure why but the slow boot was persistent even after I disabled expo. I just now upgraded my BIOS from v1223 to v1654. It reset all my settings, including my expo and for now, it boots normally. But I am hesitant to enable the expo again because just enabling it that one time was enough to mess up my boot time until this major bios change came out.