I'm at my wit's end. I got my new SSD in and after a struggle got it working just great. For a few days. This morning I started the pc and it gave a drive error (my audio drive letter). It did the repair and restarted. My new drive would not boot. Hell resumes.
 
At this point, I'm hoping for a way to NOT clean install again. System restore is out of the question because the boot was never written to the drive. It was written to another drive letter that's vanished from the system. Is it possible to partition the SSD with enough room for the OS to be loaded onto (I have 200GB available of 465GB), leaving all my stuuf in place, then load the OS from USB and it will all function? I can only hope. If there's a different way, I'm all ears. As I get older there's probably a physical truth to that as well - lol. Thanks

Do you have a repair disk handy? The Windows Media disk may also work. I have gotten a similar error in the past with the oddest fix (no boot detected).

Launched computer from repair disk and chose restore route, but got an error of "installed version does not match disk" and rebooted. On reboot it magically found the boot sector on the SSD. Happened a handful of times over 4 years and never found the cause.

Windows Media disk itself should have a repair option as well.

I've tried a half dozen times with the Win 10 USB Media - no fix in sight. Is it possible to partition the SSD, load Win 10, and have the apps work under the OS?

It's possible to partition the SSD.
But loading Win 10 on one partition will not give you access to running any programs previously installed on the other partition. Just not possible.

Thanks, Mike. Let me ask ya one more, sir - If I write the OS to the small partition and reinstall all the apps to the large side - will they reconnect should I have to clean install the OS at a point? Thanks

That would depend on the programs/App's themselves, if they are all self contained, not reliant on registry entries etc. Back in my gaming days things like Doom Series, Quake Series, (installed on another drive) were all able to function perfectly well after an format and reinstall of the OS, most things however won't be able to do that.
 
But no, most stuff will need reinstalling I think.

Lazesoft Recovery Suite

http://www.lazesoft.com/
 
This seems to work for me even though I haven't dealt with SSDs yet.
 
I would also try to find out what is causing your problem.

10 hours later, screw it. Made a gpt drive out of it, used rufus to write an iso to my usb stick. If I can't get this system to fly after all I've been through this past week, I'm gonna tap out.
 
Moral of the story is - save yourself a crapton of time looking for fixes. They are just more wasted hours.

The OS drive has a partition on it for the Master Boot Record(MBR), and it is unclear if that is what is corrupted. As mentioned above, an additional partition splitting the OS from programs will not be a solution, as almost all software these days requires registry entries that only occur from installation. It will not save you much to do this, if anything.
 
To protect from this in the future, an image of the SSD to a magnetic HDD is the best recovery option for an unrecoverable MBR. When I tested restoring the image (Macrium Reflect) I found that both partitions (MBR and remainder of the drive) required formatting prior to the restoration for it to be successful. The first attempt actually corrupted the MBR, which seemed to be a known issue, but the fix software offered by Macrium did not repair it properly.
 
Unfortunately, such an image (and associated bootable recovery media) must be made when the system is stable and cannot be done after the fact.

The install was bad out of the gate because I had no idea that even though you point to the SSD, if any other drive is in service, the MBR will get written to it. The fact I did a ton of Googling beforehand and never saw this little tidbit says enough about the lack of documentation out there for a task that's long in the tooth. I fixed it once, it corrupted and couldn't be fixed again. So, an image wasn't really an option. I will definitely make one once I have the elements in place. I have the clean OS up, RME and UAD2 installed, loading SPLAT right now. All my folders are copied, too. I made pretty good time once I threw in the towel. Thanks everyone who took the time to look into this for me. Sonar forum guys rule.