Update
Burned the iso and upon first boot the disc actually made it all the way to where it shows the installed OS and the radio button to repair windows! I couldn't believe it! I was so happy. Immediately a popup came up saying "C:\$RECYCLE.BIN\S-1-5-20 is corrupt and unreadable. Please run the chkdsk utility..." Followed by many more popups of same…
...meanwhile behind this popup was another, and when I finally got to it, it was the standard screen that comes up to say it found errors in the Windows installation and asked if I wanted to fix them. I clicked YES and Details and said among other things it was fixing Boot Manager and System Volume…
After only a second or two it auto-rebooted. The reboot ended with the same old black text screen asking if I want to go into Windows Recovery or Boot Normally. And I got the same old results. (Win Rec would just disappear/reappear if I chose it, and Boot Normally ended in
THIS.)
When I tried booting from the CD again, I got the error about it not being compatible…. after several tries it got as far as the keyboard screen again, so I used SHIFT F10 to get to a command prompt.
Ran chkdsk c: and it scrolled a million lines real fast that all said: File record segment [xxxx] is an orphan. So ran chkdsk c: /f and it deleted all the orphaned files and completed. Ran it again using the /b switch and it found no bad clusters or errors. Ran a final time using /f and it found no errors.
I had high hopes it might boot now, but no such luck. The hard disk LED flashes briefly with the MS Windows words at the bottom of screen, then it goes black and I get
this again.
So I repeated what was suggested earlier, [boot from CD, shift F10, and] diskpart / select c / active … but got the same error as before about it not being a fixed MBR disk.
Also repeated volume checking for bootmgr and it found it in C but oddly it is no longer found in the HP_Recovery partition… only in C. (So maybe Windows Repair did do something when I was able to get into it that once and it said it was fixing the boot manager.)
I tried many more times to boot the CD and try the Repair hyperlink, but it tells me "this version is not compatible…" every time. I don't know why it worked the first time only.
I ran a DPS Self-test on the hard disk from inside the BIOS. It passed.
I checked the boot sequence again… it's still correct.
I tried booting into safe mode…. the files start scrolling down the monitor in text mode but shortly I get an error and it's back to the built-in Windows Recovery text screen that just disappears/reappears if I select to repair.
Seems like the error when trying to make the C drive active (i.e. "this is not a fixed MBR disk") is key... but I don't know how that got screwed up... even Easus re-sizing should not have caused that, and Paragon is supposed to support GPT... there is no reason it would have changed those kinds of parameters just using the default backup method.
