Disk Boot Failure, Attempting to restore EFI partition

Well, as you know, there's nothing of interest shown by Minitool Partition Wizard apart from the absence of what would be of interest.

It seems you may have a chance of recovering your Windows partition.

Question is, would you be confident in it? (Ok, a half decent recovery program will give you an assessment of the validity of the data and the probability of successful recovery.

I also note all your disks are MBR rather than GPT - the more modern and robust file system. Any reason for that?
Whats the Difference Between GPT and MBR When Partitioning a Drive?

Some things to consider:

If you recover your Windows partition, you will need to do what I said in #5 to get Windows up and running again.
It is not enough simply to recover C: - there is at least one more partition you need, + the boot sector.
Depending on what you have installed, you may find a clean install the easiest and most reliable way tog go.

Your BIOS probably doesn't support UEFI- unless perhaps there is an upgrade that does. If so, GPT + UEFI would be an improvement.

When using a SSD, then using AHCI gives better performance, again, if supported by your BIOS.
Why do i need AHCI with a SSD Drive (Guide Here!) ... - Crucial Community

Recovering C: may at least allow you to recover data there, of course, if you don't already have backups.

Hopefully this experience will encourage you to start using disk imaging routinely - e.g. Macrium reflect (free) + its boot medium _ external storage for disk image sets. Disk images allow you to recover quite quickly without technical help even if your disk fails (new disk required!) or is inaccessible.

Thanks much again @dalchina for your support and advice!

dalchina said:

Some things to consider:

If you recover your Windows partition, you will need to do what I said in #5 to get Windows up and running again.
It is not enough simply to recover C: - there is at least one more partition you need, + the boot sector.
Depending on what you have installed, you may find a clean install the easiest and most reliable way tog go.

Your BIOS probably doesn't support UEFI- unless perhaps there is an upgrade that does. If so, GPT + UEFI would be an improvement.

When using a SSD, then using AHCI gives better performance, again, if supported by your BIOS.
Why do i need AHCI with a SSD Drive (Guide Here!) ... - Crucial Community

Recovering C: may at least allow you to recover data there, of course, if you don't already have backups.

Hopefully this experience will encourage you to start using disk imaging routinely - e.g. Macrium reflect (free) + its boot medium _ external storage for disk image sets. Disk images allow you to recover quite quickly without technical help even if your disk fails (new disk required!) or is inaccessible.

So while I am awaiting my SSD RMA from Samsung I'm looking into backup solutions as you've mentioned above. Long story short: I did try to set up an automated backup awhile back (with it's own dedicated drive) through Windows (which just backed up "critical" files) but found the process cumbersome and of relatively little value at the point where I actually needed to restore.

This was in Win7 though, so perhaps it's improved in Win10?

Is there any scheme out there that can give me an active "clone" of my boot drive in a manner that might make it easier to hot swap the drive in the event of a failure - or is having an automated backup image just a better solution altogether?

I have a RAID array currently for my data partition but I've found these partitions not optimal for boot - thus I've been running with an SSD boot + RAID data configuration for awhile now.

Is Macrium Reflect my best option for imaging my boot partition - will the home version suffice or is it worth biting bullet and purchasing a license?

Thanks!!!

Macrium Reflect (free) is perfectly adequate for normal users.
macrium reflect v6 home edition worth the price vs free Solved - Windows 10 Forums
Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free

You have control of the number of images kept; you can schedule images.

Beware automated though- ideally your backup is offline, powered down, physically separate. (Think potential power spike, ransomware propagation.... not to mention fire flood and theft.

Backup and Restore (Windows 7) exists as such in '10. Some people have learnt to use it and live with its quirks; others decry it and praise Macrium. It's not been updated, improved, documented.