Out of my depth here, C drive died.

[Knuckle Dragger]

Out of the blue my SSD C: drive died. It was the bootable drive and I'm not sure how to proceed. I have a spare drive but how do I get it all to boot up and let me use Macrium Reflect to restore? I do have the Windows 10 CD but I have just recently upgraded to 11, and the back up is from 10.

 

[Twisted_Metal]

You may need to re-install Win 10 from the CD, restore from the Win 10 backup and then upgrade to Windows 11.

Sorry… No knowledge about Macrium Reflect.

 

[tom3]

Put a new drive in my nephew's laptop. Got the system restore from MS website. Been a while but seems like the I got enough info on a thumb drive to get the process started. Might read around on the website to get started.

 

[Knuckle Dragger]

You may need to re-install Win 10 from the CD, restore from the Win 10 backup and then upgrade to Windows 11.

Sorry… No knowledge about Macrium Reflect.

I'm thinking you might be right. I'm going to try and take the back up drive and the new drive to another computer and see if I can get Macrium to reimage the C drive. If not re-install everything. Glad all that's on the C drive is the operating system.

 

[Knuckle Dragger]

Well, that sucked, remember to back up more than once a year....

 

[Gary S]

If the C drive crashed, you don't want to make an image of it on a new drive. If you do, you will have two bad drives. Since you have your data on a second drive, and the C drive had only the operating system, it will probably be easiest to simply install Windows from scratch on a new drive and you should be back in business.

 

[Knuckle Dragger]

If the C drive crashed, you don't want to make an image of it on a new drive. If you do, you will have two bad drives. Since you have your data on a second drive, and the C drive had only the operating system, it will probably be easiest to simply install Windows from scratch on a new drive and you should be back in business.

My old drive was so dead nothing would see it. What I ended up doing was like you said, installed Windows and then did the system restore from my back up. Unfortunately the back up was a year old. I lost some unimportant stuff. Right now I'm imaging the system and creating bootable recovery software. I appreciate the input, it's spot on.

 

[GoldenOne7710]

My old drive was so dead nothing would see it. What I ended up doing was like you said, installed Windows and then did the system restore from my back up. Unfortunately the back up was a year old. I lost some unimportant stuff. Right now I'm imaging the system and creating bootable recovery software. I appreciate the input, it's spot on.

Weird. I'm going thru the exact same right now. The HDD on one of my Dell Inspiron laptops crashed. It wasn't used very often, but I kinda needed it when it crashed. I noticed it was up for an update, I initiated the update, and it crashed during the update. I found a replacement HDD (exact same as the original) and have it on the way. That PC doesn't have a OS disk, nor was it backed up. So....I'm curious if I can redownload Windows 10 from Microsoft since I had upgraded from the original Windows 7 that the PC came with. Anybody know?

 

[Gary S]

You should be able to go to Microsoft's site and download a new copy of Windows 10. They should be organized enough to be able to find your machine in their computer system so they can authorize the reload.
There is some help here.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10startfresh

 

[carhead22000]

i would try to do a low level format on old drive,its been awhile but i used to use a old windows 98 disc and go from there.then reinstall operating system.