No, it seems to have lost its boot sector as well as the will to live (spinning disk, not SSD).
Attempts at repairing it with various utilities have so far been unsuccessful. I'll try a restore off the last backup and see what happens. Fortunately, there's nothing vital on it that isn't elsewhere.
I generally use it for odd jobs like updating modem firmware etc
Not a very good omen though
I'm really quite happy with 8.1 (the laptop is W7 tho), had very little problems with it, faster than W7 and with Classic Start Menu, hardly ever see a tile or other MS annoyance ....