Inaccessible Boot Device After Itunes Update

After a routine iTunes update on my Lenovo X220 laptop with a Samsung 500 GB SSD drive I'm in a loop with the above message. I found that Win10 by default does not enable the F8 key for Safe Mode entry nor does it automatically create restore points (big surprise to me!).

Finally I created a USB stick with Win10 ISO image and booted with the Windows repair options. Unfortunately, nothing worked (no restore point available, no prior image, auto repair does not solve the booting problem). I modified the BCDEDIT file to activate F8 and booted to the safe boot screen (lots of F8 finger tapping!!) However, selecting the safe mode boot also resulted in inaccessible boot device.

Booting into the DOS prompt allowed me to access the C: drive but the dir command only shows one file of 0 bytes and 0 dir(s) with 69,611,520 bytes free. My 500 GB SSD drive was about half full at the time of the problem.

I'm about ready to admit defeat but I thought I would ask my go to forum for ideas, I'm out of things to do. I'm on a boat and don't have access to all my tools such as a USB drive case so I can't check the SSD drive independently. I do have a USB stick with a Win10 ISO image downloaded from the Microsoft website using my ancient Lenovo XP notebook which thankfully still works.

Any thoughts?

 

I multi-boot two laptops. When the Boot choice menu comes up, I can select Win 10 and press F8 to bring up the full array of Advanced Options.

Restore points need to be set up in System Protection.

In Command Prompt did you try Bootrec /RebuildBCD?

 

Thanks for the suggestion on Bootrec, I'll give it a try.