Finally got it running - I had been trying this from the advanced options when booting off an installdvd.
I installed win8 on another HD, put non-booting drive in USB bay & am running it now.
This all started out with Win8 not booting, 'PC ran into a problem... error 0xc000021a', followed by 'Automatic Repair couldn't repair your PC...' - all entries in log file seemed to say no problems found!
Ok, back to my 'finally got it running' comment, after telling me it might take some time, I get the 'windows resource protection could not perform the requested operation' message.
F**K Me!
What happened to the good ol' repair install that you could run in XP? I looked at the 'refresh' option, but really don't want to re-install all those friggin' programs...