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).
