The system is 2 years old. No recovery images were ever created.
Here are the original symptoms.
1. Can't boot into Windows 8.1 on Dell XPS 8700.
2. OS Refresh fails.
3. OS Restore points fail.
4. OS Automatic repair fails.
5. Restart Options fail (i.e. Safe Mode, Boot debugging mode).
6. Command Prompt fails (can't find any administrator accounts).
This has been done to date:
Created a bootable flash drive. After changing the BIOS setting to boot up using the USB flash drive first, the PC booted up successfully. I was then able to get to the command prompt and backup the user data files.
I then went back into the BIOS and changed the boot order back for the internal HDD. I rebooted and ultimately started a PC Reset (Factory restore). After the reset process reached 4%, I received a message that the reset failed. A subsequent restart then gave me a BCD File error message 0xc000000d "The BCD File is missing information". The following restart yielded, as I can best recall, "No boot partitions found on the internal HDDs". And, I could no longer see the UEFI firmware menu, just the BIOS (A06). After changing the boot order and booting up on the flash drive, I could see that many files apparently had been marked for deletion on the C: drive as the User profiles were not shown. At one point, the flash drive had become the C: drive and the HDD was X:. But that later cleared up. After getting the C: prompt for the HDD I issued the following commands Bootrec /fixmbr, Bootrec /fixboot, Bootrec scanos and Bootrec rebuildbcd. After trying to once again boot up on the internal HDD, I got a different variant of the BCD File error, 0xc00000098 "The BCD File doesn't contain valid info for the OS".
Any chance of recovery from this situation? Otherwise, I guess we'll have to get a replacement drive (i.e. SSD) and a copy of Windows 10. Thanks.