I have a 3 month old Samsung 980 Pro 2TB SSD installed in my MicroCenter PowerSpec G419 from years ago. It was working nicely for those 3 months - I had used Samsung Magician to migrate from my old SSD to the new SSD, then disabled the old SSD driver in Windows to keep the old drive relatively safe. Today I tried to switch my USB switch and monitors from my work laptop to my G419 desktop where the SSD was installed (I share KVM with a laptop) and it wouldn't come back. I eventually had to hold the power button down to force it to power off. When I powered it back on and got the monitors switched it was copying BIOS from B to A as it sometimes does when it freezes entirely and has to do a hard reboot (maybe a couple times a year). This reverted me to booting to my old SSD. I changed the BIOS to boot to the new SSD again and now Windows startup hangs on the spinning circle black screen repeatedly until I've powered down 3 times at which point it offers some recovery menu. Using this to boot in Safe mode with Networking also hangs. I decided to switch my BIOS back to booting from the old drive. Oh, I think I was actually able to boot to the new SSD once, but then having seen a message in the system event log about running chkdsk /F I decided to run chkdsk /F on the new SSD. After that is when I could no longer boot to that drive.
If I try to access the new drive from my old Windows installation via File Explorer it tells me access denied. If I start a command prompt as administrator I can see files on there and it looks fine. I found a file under Windows\System32\LogFiles\Srt that was referenced in a troubleshooting step I took from the recovery menu. The file is SrtTrail.txt and has today's date and the last line of text in it looks like this:
A hard disk could not be found. If a hard disk is installed, it is not responding.
That's puzzling because it's written to the hard drive that supposedly has the problem.
I'm considering the drastic option of re-running Samsung data migration to re-create the partition on the new drive based on the old drive, but I don't really like that option because I took a long time to decompress all the compressed files on that drive after migrating it.
So, I'm looking for other ideas to get the existing drive back to working order or to perform a fresh install of Windows so I can have a clean slate on the new drive and just keep the old drive separate in case I want to get anything from it (I also have Zoolz that has all my files backed up if I want to restore from there).
What's the easiest way to install Windows 11 to a separate hard drive if I don't have any install media?
