Boot drive busted, confused on what's next.

[NathanN]

Hello! I'll try to sum up my situation quickly:

Three years ago I bought a 64 gig crucial SSD to boot windows off of for my home build. It's served me well, but today it decided it was time to die. It won't show up in the bios, changing cords won't work, and I actually got it to work and log in to windows for a minute, but then everything became unresponsive and it wouldn't show up in the bios again.

I'm just going to go ahead and buy a new SSD (a much larger one), but here's my problem. I'm not completely sure how I am going to go about getting windows 10 onto the new SSD when it arrives, and how to get all of the files from my dead SSD onto my new one. That, and some of my AMD driver files are split, with some being on my E drive and some on my C drive (sometimes the driver update installation would crash if I didn't only download it onto my C drive. I prefer installing it to my E drive because my SSD was so small. It was bothersome).

So my question is this: How am I going to install windows 10 onto the new SSD, and transfer all of my old settings/files onto the new one? Will the fact that some AMD drivers are installed in different locations be a problem? I have my windows 8.1 product key, but will that work when when I have to reinstall windows 10?

I think I know how to do it, but usually if I do it my way I'll forget something and mess it up.

I have access to another computer, what I think I'm going to have to do is download a windows 10 ISO onto a usb and try to install windows on the new SSD with that. But will that cause a conflict with the second drive which also has windows on it if they're both being used at the same time? (I know it's dead, but I think I'll try to get it to work for a minute again to try and transfer files. Probably not the best plan but that's why I'm asking you guys here).

Could give me some steps on what to do(and possibly where to find the correct windows 10 ISO download? It's this, right?)

Thank you!

 

[Darkbreeze]

If you had Windows 10 installed then it already has a digital entitlement assigned to your motherboard and will automatically be activated after installation the minute you connect to the internet. You'll need to do a clean install and if the drive is not able to be accessed, then the files on there simply cannot be recovered except by an expensive data recovery service. There is no if's, and's or but's about it, if the drive is done, then so is the data on it.

This is why we implore people to keep all important file data, documents and folders backed up to secondary or external drives.

You can create Windows 10 installation media here:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=691209


And simply click "I don't have a product key" during installation. You won't need it. Your system already has a digital entitlement if you had it installed and have not changed motherboards. Only a motherboard change will affect activation, and even then, in every case I've personally dealt with so far, a chat with the microsoft help desk resulted in reactivating the system after changing motherboards. That's entirely up to MS though, but I haven't seen them deny it yet if you simply explain that you had to change motherboards.

Once you have the installation media and the new drive is installed, simply follow these steps, exactly:

http://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/1950-windows-10-clean-install.html