Windows Failed to Load - Winload.exe Corrupt or Missing

[BHollowell]

I've been getting an error message every time I try to upgrade my Win7 Pro install to Win10. When I researched the issue I discovered that somehow my system partition was only 37MB instead of the usual 100MB that Windows creates when installing. This probably because I cloned the drive from a 1TB mechanical to my current 256GB SSD a year ago.

In any case, I attempted to resize the system partition by using Partition Wizard to first shrink the OS partition, then expand the System partition to fill the extra unallocated space. Everything went smoothly with the resize, but now I can't boot Windows - I just get the error in the title of this thread every time. I knew it probably wasn't a good idea to mess around with the beginning section of the OS partition, and I'm really kicking myself in the pants right now for not doing a disk backup first like I knew I should have.

So far I've only tried the bootrec commands and system repair, but neither have worked. Can anyone provide some additional methods I should try?

 

[BHollowell]

I finally got this issue resolved! Not sure what did it other than pure dumb luck. I kept at it with System Repair and the bootrec commands. It was strange that I kept getting different results each time. Sometimes System Repair would crash, sometimes it would say no problems can be resolved, ect. The bootrec commands were the strangest. At the very end when I would run "bootrec /scanos" it said 0 OS detected. For the hell of it I decided to do fixboot, fixmbr and rebuildbcd one more time and it seems to have worked!

My OS is back online and the System partition is a solid 300Mb. Time to do a disk image and then try the Win10 upgrade again!



EDIT: It seems I spoke a little too soon. I can boot in to my OS now and log in, but ONLY when my USB flash drive is connected. It seems that bootrec put the boot configuration on that drive instead of using my System partition on the SSD. When I run bcdedit within windows it says "device partition=I:"

Since I can't run the bootrec commands within Windows, how should I go about changing this? See the attached image for details.