Windows 10: SSD w/ OS "disappears"; Macrium disk image restore brings it back[?]

A couple of days ago, I booted up my PC, which has an SSD OS C drive and a conventional D drive for data storage, and the boot failed. So, I booted into Windows RE/Troubleshooting. "Reset this PC" was not available. In "Advanced options", "Startup Settings" was missing, and the options that I tried to use---Startup Repair, System Restore, and Command prompt---all failed, with the last two returning error messages. I then booted up with an Active@ Boot Disc recovery disc, but that interface showed only the data drive, not the SSD OS drive.

So, though I had a Macrium Reflect disk image backup that had been made when both the SSD (C) and the HDD (D) were working, I decided to do a clean install of Win 10 first, mainly to see what would happen. When I booted into that new install, there was only a single, OS C drive shown in "This PC", in "Disk Management", and "Device Manager". I wasn't sure what had happened, but I then decided to restore my Macrium Reflect disk image.

Before restoring the Macrium Reflect disk image, I used the Win Media Creation Tool to delete all the partitions that were shown, until I had only one entry, Drive 0 Unallocated Space, which was the size (@1863 GB) of the conventional D drive, which I then formatted. At that point, I bailed out of the install process, booted up using my Macrium Reflect rescue media, and then completed the disk image restore.

I didn't notice this at first, but the next day I found that there were now *two* drives: the SSD OS C drive and the HDD data D drive.

My question is, what's the most likely explanation for how this disappearing/reappearing act could have happened? Did my SSD C drive fail/disappear due to some kind of Windows error, and then Macrium Reflect's restoral via the disk image fixed it? But if that were the case, why is that the clean install of Windows didn't show the SSD drive either? Is this perhaps due to an intermittent hardware problem?

Thanks for any input!

:)

 

System Image Restore

This is another good reason to use a 3rd party disk image backup program such as Macrium Reflect (free for personal use) or Backupper (free). Neither of them depend on a perhaps crippled OS to restore the image; rather, you boot from the respective rescue
medium.

A clean install of the OS occasionally is good, but for just moving the OS and installed programs to a different hard drive or SSD, or going back to a previous build to escape a problem with a new build, either of them just get it done, quickly and easily.

 

Windows Boot Sector corrupted

Does your HDD installation still work? If so then this would be the correct procedure to follow:

• Use Macrium Reflect (or a similar tool) to create an image of your installation.
• Disconnect the HDD, connect the SSD.
• Boot the machine with the Macrium Reflect bootable rescue flash disk.
• Restore the image to the SSD.

In general: When restoring images you must make sure at the first reboot to connect the new disk only. If both disks are connected then you risk ruining both installations.

 

The start of the problem makes me think that BIOS may have lost track of SSD or BOOT sector was corrupt. For starters, I would check SMART on that SSD and see if any communication problem was encountered.

 

Although Lite-On indicates in their specs that SMART is supported, my Speccy app indicates that the Lite-On SSD does *not* support SMART. (Speccy does, btw, show SMART info for the Toshiba HDD.)