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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!
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