Missing or corrupted winload.exe file(but wait, there is more!)

[jwut]

So last night I turned my pc off using the power button, as i've done many a time, because it had gotten hot in my room. When i powered up today, I received the dreaded winload.exe is missing or corrupt error.


I've never personally dealt with it, so I began searching forums and such as I normally would.

Origninally, I ran the chkdsk and it found errors.

I then ran the bcdedit /export C:\BCD_Backup
C:
cd boot
attrib bcd -s -h -r
ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
bootrec /Rebuild Bcd

commands from RE. After the reboot, I found that my HD was not loading at all. Monitors are blank, and the hd light on my tower is not responding normally.

So, at this point, I am assuming my HD has died and that I somehow killed it by running the bootrec commands. Being that this is very specific problem, its hard to forum surf for the issue, so now I am posting it. While I find it hard to believe that I physically killed my HD with this cmd command, I also acknolwedge that I've been turning my PC off and on using the power button throughout the past 4 hours trying to troubleshoot/fix the original winload.exe issue, and that could potentially have shorted out the HDD?

At this point, I really am dumbfounded, can anyone shed some light here for me?

Thanks

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

http://www.coderforlife.com/projects/win7boot/restoring_winload/

 

[jwut]

http://www.coderforlife.com/projects/win7boot/restoring_winload/

http://www.coderforlife.com/projects/win7boot/restoring_winload/

Thanks! this looks like it should work, however on W8 after clicking "repair", you dont get the option to find the drive that windows is installed on(like it does on w7), it just takes you to the Troubleshooting window that has the refresh your pc, system restore, and advanced(cmd) options.

Currently, I am trying to restart the computer over and over until I can get the actual winload is missing error, as I assume that the error should contain the appropriate drive name within it. Is there a manual way to get the information like in the previous versions?

 

[jwut]

polite bump, ive tried googling how to locate the drive but to no avail. Anyone have any experience with step 6:

"On the recovery tools page tale note of the drive letter being used by the recovery system" on windows 8?

 

[jwut]

http://www.coderforlife.com/projects/win7boot/restoring_winload/

So, I just tried using D: on a whim, to see if it would work, and actually was able to get down to the line where you enter "del winload.exe". I receive the error "Could not find D:\windows\system32\winload.exe"


Is it safe to say that I'm just boned at this point? or is it possible that the W8 installation is on another drive?