Windows 10: Recovering Windows 10 environment from a failed SSD

I want to keep this short and to the point, so for brevity and readability, here's a quick background.


I have three hard drives and the computer in this scenario has a single SATA and NVMe interface:


- a 2TB NVMe SSD disk 0

- a 1TB SATA drive disk 1

- a 2TB SATA drive disk 2


Disk 0 has the corrupt, but seemingly intact encrypted Windows 10 Pro environment. Disk 1 has a year old Windows 10 Pro environment. Disk 2 is to backup disk 0 on so I can get the SSD replaced under warranty.


Last week, disk 0 failed abruptly. I was using the computer when it suddenly shut off on me. Upon restarting, the BIOS threw a SMART error on the drive and the log in screen would sit spinning for at least five minutes after putting in my password. I held down the power button a few times to restart it, probably out of impatience. Since it's been about a week, I can't remember the exact order in which everything happened, but I recall distracting myself with work or something else after trying to log in and it eventually got past the log in screen, but it was virtually frozen. I could move the mouse/toggle the caps lock light, but I couldn't get task manager open, the run prompt, nothing and had to forcibly power it off.


Eventually, I either was able to boot either to recovery mode or from a live USB. After various troubleshooting and googling of error messages and fault codes, I was able to determine that the SSD is in some sort of read-only failed state that I can't clear. Since it's encrypted with Bitlocker, the only way I've found that I can decrypt it is to boot into the Windows environment on disk 1 and manually put in the recovery key to unlock disk 0. Here's where I start running into issues and why I'm posting here for help.

I've tried cloning drive 0 onto drive 2, then using a combination of sfc /scannow, chkdsk, and the Startup Repair option in the Windows recovery environment menu to repair the data. Ultimately, I keep ending up getting a 0xc0000001 error when trying to boot from the recovered partition on drive 2. However, the data on drive 0 is still mostly intact, especially under C:\Windows\System32. I gave up trying to resolve it, but I'm not interested in "try this list of things and cross your fingers" advice, mainly because it takes at least 12 hours to clone drive 0 on to drive 2 and I don't want to do it again unless there's a good chance of getting it to work. I will take ways of identifying what is causing the error under advisement.


Another weird behavior is that I installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 on drive 2 with it inserted into the native SATA port on the computer instead of having drive 1 plugged in there and using a USB/SATA adapter to plug in drive 2, but couldn't get that environment to recognize the encrypted Bitlocker partition on drive 0. I can only unlock it from the Windows environment on drive 1. Strange, but whatever.


Anyways, my goal is to either clone drive 0 on to drive 2, or copy all of the user profiles/installed applications/associated registry settings/etc over to a fresh Windows 10 install on drive 2 so I can boot into it and have virtually the same again and I'm wondering if Right now, I'm testing an idea where I'm using `rsync -avrP` in WSL to copy all of the ProgramFiles/ProgramData directories, user profile directories, and System32 over to drive 2 just to see what happens when I try booting into the environment. I know some of the registry/system environment level stuff is stored in System32/config, but I know there's a lot of config files linked to identification numbers/hashes/whatever that are randomly generated, so I don't know if this Frankenstein project of copying data from drive 0 onto a fresh environment on drive 2 is worth a try.

:)

 

New SSD with Recovery USB not recovering Windows 10

Hello,

The issue you're experiencing will require advanced troubleshooting steps so we suggest that you post your query on our
TechNet forums for better assistance.

Regards.

 

Survey Reveals Companies' Early Windows 8 Reactions and Plans

Bull fucking shit.

 

Recover environment

Can I recover environment in Windows 10

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