Stuck in repair/windows boot manager loop error 0xc0000225

Hi I really hope some kind and clever soul can help me - as I've been grappling with this issue for a week now and am at my wits end

System: PC. Motherboard:Asus M4A78 Pro, CPU: Phenom 9850 quad-core black edition, Bootdisk:HDD Crucial M550 128Gb SSD, Memory: Kingston HyperX 3x2Gb DIMMs, Graphics card Radeon xxxx Ti (can't remember and PC won't boot )

Over the last few weeks I noticed my PC would no longer resume from sleep correctly - fans would spin up, CDrom would initialise, but no HDMI output to screen and no response to power button - only option is to reset or hard power cycle. Setting bios (AMIbios) to S1 or S3 only prevented the issue, Auto would repeatably demonstrate the issue.

Last weekend whilst investigating the sleep issue and having to reset the PC as a result this windows 10 came up with a repair screen, successfully repaired and I was able to log in. It then occurred again and this time the system became stuck in a loop of "Windows failed to start." Boot manager dialogue (see below but ignore the virtualbox bit I borrowed this screenshot from elsewhere on www)





At this point running MEMTEST I diagnosed a faulty DIMM. By cycling through 6 DIMMs through all slot combinations and many MEMTESTs I am currently running 3 x 2Gb modules that I am confident are good and I can run various Linux distros for hours on end with no issue. Weirdly I cannot run any Windows based recovery tools at all from CDRom drive or bootable USB, I know there is partition table corruption and possibly wimboot/MBR issues - more on this later.

If I tried to use Win 7 64bit DVD I'd get the loading files screen,then 0.5 second flash up of starting windows screen before coming back to the above boot manager screen.

If I press enter to continue, it says choose an operating system to start or press TAB to select a tool. The operating system has one option: windows setup [EMS enabled]. To specify an advanced option for this choice press F8 (doing so brings up usual boot options such as safe mode, with networking etc I have tried every option and ALL bring me back to the above screen).

I have tried various Windows ISO solutions including Kyhi's boot DVD/drive but all end up back at the above screen.

I'd love to be able to access bootrec.exe tool /rebuildBCD /fixMBR /fixboot but I just cannot get into any windows environment or command prompt to do so.

The only success I have is booting with Linux - the main tool I'm working with is GParted Live iso burnt to DVD. Using this (again for hours with no hardware issues) Debian based environment I can run the excellent Testdisk which allows the identification of missing partitions, recovery of MBR by copying across the backup MBR and so on.

other pics


dfsf

athe above is testdisk output. My issue is that testdisk seems to be saying that boot record is OK but partitions are mangled and I am struggling to identify the right partition structure to write to the partition table. Of the 3 found and shown above:

all show as deleted when testdisk first runs its analysis - but as user you choose whether to mark them as boot, primary, logical or extended - and then write that info to the partition table.

The first one does not display any files subdirectories
The second one does show all the structure and files of my c:\ drive and I've been able to copy the files over to an external drive (but testdisk on another screen says this partition cant be recovered)
The third partition contains Windows recovery files such as winre.wim and boot.sdi (can I do anything with these?) but by the looks of things overlaps the two versions of the c:\ drive potential partitions - maybe this is because I had to use Win 7 DVD to try to recover Win 10 as I was an upgrader from 7?

Final thing to mention is I was running two other HDD in a RAID configuration which I'm struggling to remember the details of but I have a horrible feeling I used windows 7 disk management to setup... if I have to bite the bullet and reinstall windows am I going to lose the ability to access those drives?

thanks for any observations or advice you can give

thanks very much Axe0 for taking the time to reply on this - much appreciated unfortunately I couldn't get Kyhi's WinPE to run so the answer is no I'm afraid.

Hi,

If I boot from that CD this is what we get:
press any key to boot from CD ROM
blue windows logo (no other text)
8 minutes+
hard drive light stays lit solid throughout
CD rom data light flashes throughout

then I believe eventually we end up at the boot manager screen but I'm doing it as I type and will correct this post if that is incorrect (the other option is that it just stays on the win logo and I have to reset) I'll be back to check in 30 mins have a car to repair in meantime :)

aha just before I got back to car repairs - it has gone from windows logo to the usual Recovery screen 'Your PC/Device needs to be repaired. An unexpected error has occurred. Error code 0xc0000225. You'll need to use recovery tools. If you don't have any installation media contact your admin or manufacturer.' Press Enter to try again or F8 for startup settings.

Ok I'll set it up to run a few passes this morning and post back around lunchtime.

Just check on the test progress:



and went back 20 mins later and it was doing this (see below) - not sure if that means there was a problem or the tests completed? So am running another 5 extended tests now.


Attachment 145223

it has been doing extended tests since last post and is just coming up to complete the 5th pass no errors thus far