Hello Forum,
I have created a problem for myself. I'm hoping you can assist me in resolving it without the need to reinstall Windows 7 Professional.
My boot drive is a 500GB Samsung SSHD in GPT format which is recommended for SSHD. I boot on an ASUS Z170-A LGA1151 Motherboard. I was recently playing around with VeraCrypt, a branch off of Truecrypt software, when I must have tried to encrypt the whole drive where the OS resides instead of encrypting a drive I had plugged in via USB. Not just the OS partition, but the whole drive. The program encountered an error stating that the drive was in use or active or something and did not allow me to continue. I then realized I had selected the wrong process and proceeded with the correct encryption method.
Long story short, I ran the computer without rebooting for over a week when suddenly I had issues transferring files to portable medium. As soon as I restart my PC, I lost the ability to boot. The motherboard will post, attempt to boot the drive, then fail to ASUS UEFI without any error messages. None. Just a white line before UEFI.
I've since installed and boot other OS partitions to my ASUS without issues so I do not believe my motherboard is the problem. I have taken the affected drive and installed in different computers and it will also not boot there. The storage partition is completely intact. I can browse every file on the disk when connected to a different PC but there is a 1MB partition before my OS partition that I believe is corrupted. I've attempted Windows startup repair from a CD and that didn't work. I've run fdisk on the drive.
I believe I have corrupted the boot partition, but I'm only firmiliar with MBR repair, I have no experience rebuilding GPT /EFI information. I did not yet have a backup of this drive. I've created an image of this drive in case I screw something up. Can someone point me in the right direction on how to manually rebuild the boot partition for a GPT drive?
I appreciate the help,