I get it, your bummed you spent at least 5 hours hunting and pecking your brilliant self righteous response. Only to have the person it's aimed at not even read it.
But that's no reason to have a meltdown publicly on the internet.
Sorry, you are correct about the last part. But yes that's what I'm saying. Your pc will run with your friends HDD in it, it'll just complain at start up. But if the boot partition is fucked it's not going to matter.
Probably just a boot corruption. You could have installed that drive in your pc as the only drive. Windows would have complained but then setup devices and booted as normal (assuming no other issues.) That way your not risking your own files.
I just had Linux mint do something very similar. After a reinstall everything is working normal.
Steel series Arctic 7 I think. Works fine. Any wired IEM will produce better sound though.