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My windows 10 PC recently crashed pretty badly (I'm not sure what caused it). When I re-booted it, the windows boot manager no longer appeared as a bootable device. After a lot of troubleshooting, I found that my primary SSD has become locked to read-only. This appears to be a hardware lock because nothing I do can make it read/write again. I'm not sure what caused this to happen, but at this point I'm just trying to recover my OS.

I have another SSD that is working as expected and am trying to clone my OS from the read only SSD to the other one. I have tried the following so far:

  • Use Aomei backup to clone the drive, this fails because it cannot find a valid windows install to clone from.
  • Manually clone the hard drive from a USB installer command prompt and create a new boot configuration. I followed these instructions for UEIF which generally were reapeated on any instructions I found. As per this post I have also tried doing this in both USB3.0 and 2.0 ports.

After following the steps, I now have a windows boot manager as an option to boot from again, but the windows splash screen never appears and it just sits there with a cursor on a black screen that sometimes has the loading symbol.

Does anyone know what might have gone wrong with this process? Alternatively can anyone suggest a process that may be better for recovering from this situation? I would be willing to install windows normally on this drive, but I'm not sure how I would recover my data after that (including my windows product key which I do not know).

ozay34
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    1. *SSD has become locked to read-only* usually means the drive is as good as dead. 2. Cloning from such drive is strongly discouraged, not because its current status but because many system files may and likely are corrupt or nonexistent by now. 3. You should have backups for any personal data that is important; if not done already what you should be concerned with is trying to salvage as much as you can to an external or non-system drive. (...) – ChanganAuto Sep 23 '22 at 02:46
  • (...) 4. Simply reinstalling would then be an easy and reliable method; since you decided to do it the dumb way now you'll likely spend more time repairing the clone than you would installing fresh and with worse results being a real possibility. Booting from Windows installation media is a must in any case. – ChanganAuto Sep 23 '22 at 02:48
  • I was taking backups until Aomei decided to start crashing my PC any time it did a backup, I meant to get around to fixing that but never took the time... Not any important info on it, but I figured the time spent trying to recover it would be worth the time spent re-installing and configuring all of the stuff I had. Thanks for the info, guess I'll have to contact samsung to see why a one year old SSD just up and bricked itself... – ozay34 Sep 23 '22 at 03:20
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    Imaging a drive is NOT backup! And yes, if still under warranty you should contact customer support. – ChanganAuto Sep 23 '22 at 03:27

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