Windows 10 upgrade failure, error code: 0xc000000f

So its been a few days and I'm officially stumped.

I used the media creation tool the other night to install Windows 10. Bad idea.

I went from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and the upgrade seemed to be working as it downloaded the files, copied windows files and then rebooted to an installer (black screen with blue circle). after a while, the installer rebooted the computer but upon rebooting, instead of re-entering the installer, it only said "Attempting Repairs". It sat at that screen a good 5 minutes until It showed an error stating "Windows could not automatically fix your PC Error code: 0xc000000f". I chose advanced options and tried to do a rollback, that failed saying something along the lines of "No windows operating systems detected" etc. I tried to run the fixmbr command from command line, it couldn't find any operating systems. It was at this point I opened up diskpart and checked "list volume" and it showed:

1.) Reserved (NTFS)

2.) OS (RAW)

3.) Recovery (NTFS)

I saw the problem right away.... RAW. the partition containing the OS and all my files was corrupted by the upgrade.

So I reformatted using the OEM windows 7 disks (Lenovo X201 Tablet) and activated using the key on the COA. I re-downloaded windows 10 and tried again thinking maybe my AV or something I had installed prevented the upgrade.

3 hours later: Same Result.

I tried one last time, using USB media instead, only to again suffer the same result.

Each "Attempt" I formatted the drive and cleared the MBR using gparted to ensure the drives were "Like-New" each time.

So then I got curious after the 4th failure with the same error thinking "Maybe it's my SSD or my laptop's drive controller... maybe it doesn't work with windows 10!". So I opted to do a clean-install of windows 10 directly from USB.

It worked. Flawlessly. Well, Almost.

The laptop did completely lock up (no keyboard or mouse) the first 6-7 times of being booted up after 1 minute and the only recourse was to hold the power button down and turn It back on. it seemed to be related to windows update downloading drivers and whatnot from MS Update for my graphics card, trackpad, etc.

Anyway now its been officially 72 hours since I installed windows 10 on this laptop and everything is stable (other than occasional graphics card "crashes" coming out of sleep.. Intel HD Graphics).

So I reached out to MS Tech support 2 days ago to inquire on what to do / how to fix this. they told me that the "clean install should activate just fine. that I don't need a key blah blah blah and that it will activate in the next 24 hours." I explained the above story several times to about 5 different reps. They all said the same thing and were quick to dismiss my issue stating it was a server issue on their end and not my laptop.

I'm so happy to talk to people reading off a script.

Anyway, now I have a laptop running windows 10, that won't activate, and If I try to go back to 7 and upgrade again, it just fails at that 2nd upgrade, 0xc000000f with a RAW partition where the main OS partition once existed.

now I've seen a few sites that say you can use some tools like testdisk to recover the partition table but NOT to use them on SSDs.

Has anyone else run into this kind of issue or know of a [creative] way around this headache? so far I've invested 4 days into this and i'm staring at a "Activate WIndows" watermark still :(

EDIT:

SOLVED! here is the solution: https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/3fk6sx/windows_10_upgrade_failure_error_code_0xc000000f/ctz7mui