My Win10 PC bricked itself and I need help. Please read all before replying.

[w10brickeditself]

I need help. A few days ago I shutdown my Win10 PC (that was upgraded from Win7 Ultimate x64) per usual, nothing out of the ordinary. Next day I boot up I notice that it says Windows Automatic Repair is running and was confused. I let it finish and it let me get into my desktop, but after about 2 minutes it immediately crashed and hard reset my PC again throwing me into that same repair screen. It fails every time and says it places a file in my Sys32 folder. Fast forward a couple days of me trying literally everything I can through making a W10 ISO boot disc, opening the cmd and trying things like bootrec and chkdsk and scf etc... and they all come back with "hey this is fine, windows detects no issues/no bad sectors" and whatever else. You get it. The one things that doesn't is bootrec which tells me for certain commands it complete the process successfully (but does NOT repair the install/MBR or whatever have you), except for the command bootrec /rebuildbcd. It always tells me that the location can't be found or whatever the exact wording is. I've run mdsched to check my RAM on advanced passes with 3 total, it always gets to the end saying no problems were detected. Which doesn't mean anything I supposed because Windows is clearly broken at this point. I just want to know if there's anyone out there who has experience with a similar issue who knows what I can do.

Needless to say at this point, I've tried a lot of things. I've tried diskpart and selecting the partition I know Windows is installed on to see if there's something I can do there, but when I force what USED TO BE (and always was in Win7 days) the C: drive to be my ACTIVE Partition/Volume it just tells me there is no Windows installations. Which does not make sense because when I use bootrec /scanos it tells me exactly where it is. C:/Windows...

You understand my frustration. I am sorry if this is not concise and makes little to no sense, but please someone has to know something more than me. I am currently using a laptop (which is what I used to create the Win10 ISO) and have my HDD plugged in via a little hardware connector that translates the SATA to USB and plugs in its own little power supply unit to the wall. With this hardware, I CAN access the files on the HDD, which leads me to believe the HDD itself is not the issue and Windows has just completely screwed itself and I don't understand how. Sidenote: I had Windows Updates disabled (or rather deferred for 35 days and the feature updates deferred for an entire year via the Update options that I did on Oct. 6th so they shouldn't have turned themselves back on yet on the day it broke itself which was the 27th), and I tried to check via the /get-packets command and it always a similar error that bootrec /rebuildbcd did, that it couldn't be found etc..

I'm at my wits end. Sorry for long confusing post. Please help. The entire point of this post was to find a way to repair my install without resetting or formatting by the way. I know that is the last resort, and I can if necessary but I'd like to recover as much data as possible. I could in theory copy it to my laptop (as much as it could hold, which is not much at all) the most important things, but if there's a way to rescue the thing all together please help me.

Side info: Win10 Pro ("upgraded" from Win7 Ultimate)
Single storage device which is my HDD (3TB but is only usable of 2 because MBR on Win7 forced it that way)
I have tried a lot of things but am willing to try them again under difference circumstances, please ask me about things you think might work and I'll reply back ASAP with what I know I have or haven't tried or if I try again. I am willing to pull out the "logs" of what the startup recovery output to upload for people to see, but it's mostly nothing useful from what I've read.
My main suspicion here is that Windows 10 somehow changed my boot drive letter because whenever I look into diskpart (keep in mind I have not looked into this since I built my PC because it was never an issue before) it says I now have 3 partitions with all different drive letters (excluding disc drives/other things). It says I have C: as 100MB system reserved (which USED TO BE the entire hard drive when I booted into windows (for example it was always C:\Windows but now since the system reserve is C: it bumped it down to D:\ which never existed to my knowledge in the first place. The third partition was just the extra space that was "unusable" because of Win7 making it an MBR drive and limiting it to 2TB for such a drive.

EDIT 1: in case this helps this is the most interesting thing I've found while looking through my crash/error logs, the particular file in Sys32 named SrtTrail;

Root cause found:
---------------------------
Boot critical file d:\boot\resources\custom\bootres.dll is corrupt.

Repair action: File repair
Result: Failed. Error code = 0x2
Time taken = 4312 ms

Repair action: System files integrity check and repair
Result: Failed. Error code = 0x490
Time taken = 2334360 ms

 

[karenjoly]

It is troubling that

"when I force the C: drive to be my ACTIVE Partition/Volume it just tells me there is no Windows installations. "

But the issue is less than a complete disaster since

"I CAN access the files on the HDD, "

Therefore I suggest that you consider saving files and reinstalling windows.