SSD seems to have failed completely

bombfrog · 11 Apr 2018

Hi all,

I have been getting BSOD - UNEXPECTED_STORE_EXCEPTION a few times a day this week and a few other errors in event viewer that seemed to point to HDD failure.

Each time it would go back in to automatic repair mode which would fail but after a few restarts it came back up each time. Today I tried to fix it and ran chkdsk /r c: . it took a while and when I came back into the room a couple of hours later it was back in automatic repair, which this time is stuck in an infinite loop.

I assume that it's new SSD time but I have no idea how to I stall WIN10 on the new one. I don't have a disk as it was a download upgrade from Win8.1

Any advice on how to get Windows onto the new drive, retrieve the old product key and preferably any data (very little as I use Dropbox) and old software keys and appdata would be life-saving at this point.

Bree · 11 Apr 2018

bombfrog said:

..I have no idea how to I stall WIN10 on the new one. I don't have a disk as it was a download upgrade from Win8.1

Any advice on how to get Windows onto the new drive, retrieve the old product key and preferably any data (very little as I use Dropbox) and old software keys and appdata would be life-saving at this point.

Other software keys may be a problem, depends on what the software is. But Windows 10 itself isn't a problem.

You don't need a key. The PC has a digital licence linked to the unique hardware ID of the PC and stored on Microsoft's activation servers. You just do a clean install of the same edition it had before (Home or Pro) and if asked for a key click the 'I don't have one' link. It then activates automatically from the digital licence as soon as it can contact the activation servers. The ssd/hdd is not part of the hardware ID, so you can replace it and still get activated.

These tutorials will help...

Create Bootable USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 10

Clean Install Windows 10

Once you have a working Windows 10 on the new SSD you may be able to put the old SSD in an external drive case and retrieve software keys and/or data from it. A lot depends on what exactly is the software you had.

bombfrog · 11 Apr 2018

Thank you, I had no idea you could do it with no product key.

Bree · 11 Apr 2018

Microsoft has streamlined activation over the years, your hardware is the 'key' now. In fact, if an OEM PC was built and supplied with W8 or W10 a product key would have been embedded in the firmware. If so, Setup should read this and not even bother to ask if you want to install Home or Pro, it will know which to install from the embedded key.