Windows 8 not booting properly suddenly

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kdubz

n00b
Joined
May 11, 2012
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Hey guys! So I recently put together a build for a friend, and let's just say this may be one of the more frustrating instances I've had. A bit of background:

So the build itself had a minor hiccup- I wanted my friend to install the GPU himself so he would know how to do it in the future. He ended up snapping one of the locking clips for one of the PCI-E slots trying to force the card in without seeing the sliding lock sitting atop the slot. No big deal, let's just use the other one. We finished the build, tried booting it up, nothing (everything turned on but no POST or video). I was pretty stressed so I started thinking of all the possible reasons this may have happened but failed to double check the 24 pin connector, which happened to be loose haha. Everything boots up and we install Windows 8 just fine.


The problem:
That was a day ago. So my buddy calls me today and tells me that Windows doesn't boot, and that he's getting some sort of error code: 0xc0021a. So we go through the following steps to try and rectify this problem:

1) Using the boot USB we used to install windows and selecting the repair option
2) Tried running automatic repair; doesn't work
3) Tried manually using the command prompt via bootrec.exe /fixmbr
4) Checking default boot drives and setting all of them to c:

The last step is the one that is bugging me. We tried to set all default drives to C: but for some reason every single time he restarts the system it doesn't work because the default was set back to a non existent E: drive, sometimes it's re-labelled as D: as well.

So what could be the problem here guys? I don't mind reformatting but if it's possible to avoid that it would be much more convenient for my friend, who already wasted a quarter of his bandwidth downloading his various steam games, etc. I guess I should include the relevant parts here too shouldn't I. Thanks in advance guys!

MoBo: ASRock Extreme 3 970
CPU: AMD FX6300
HDD: WD 1TB Caviar Black
RAM: G. Skill Ripjaws X 8GB 2x4
GPU: ASUS HD7870 DirectCUII
PSU: Corsair CX500
 
One thing to point out, you don't need to reformat just reinstall windows. This way you can just grab the steam games from the windows.old folder and not have to red download anything. Afterwards you can delete the folder to save space.
 
Sorry guys, I may have forgotten to add that part in. So we tried a system restore first before anything else. The only restore point was to prior to the installation of his drivers, so we tried to select that. Unfortunately, Windows spit out some error about not being able to use the restore point due to a the c: drive not being there (or that's what he's telling me). Either way, the restore point won't work unfortunately!
 
Thanks guys, I'll let my friend know. I'll post back if anything comes up!
 
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