"philo" wrote

| I assume it's running chkdsk /f

It's nowhere near that point. It won't boot to
Windows at all. Most of the time it won't see the
DVD to boot from that. No luck with USB. It starts
up with a message about starting repair. Then it
goes blank. Or it shows a bluescreen with C0000185,
which seems to be CD not found. I managed to boot
Memtest86, which ran fine, but then couldn't boot
a BootIt disk, which I though I might use to try
setting the restore partition active.

It's very erratic. Even the Win8 install disk failed to
do a fresh install. But I seem to be able to find all the
problems online. A lot of people have had repair loop
problems with Win8. The Win8 install disk error, that
"some files are missing", also seems to be a known error.

This is my first time dealing with GPT partitioning,
UEFI, etc, so it's dificult to figure out what error
means what.