copy and paste runs very slowly and never did before.

Win 10 installation flash drive took 6 hours to make! I also made a cd of the same installation. that didn't take as long to make. I ran 'startup repair' using the cd and after about 1 second, it said "could not repair your pc" and offered no reasons of why not.Under 'advanced options' i tried to do a system restore to earlier point in time and message said "must specify which windows O/S to restore to". seems pretty silly to me that the program can't determine what the O/S is. besides that, i never saw that option.

i also created a Macrium 'recovery drive'. under troubleshoot - startup repair message said "a required device isn't connected or can't be accessed. ERROR: 0cxc0000000e (File:\Windows\system32\winload.exe). you'll need to use recovery tools."press enter to try again. press F8 for start settings". it must have a bug in it because every time i pressed either option, the screen just flickers and returns to where it was.... very frustrating!

Macrium boot repair is very good.
Did you detach the other disk?

I used the Win 10 installation disk and tried startup repair. Startup repair "could not repair" my pc. Other than that, i could not find any reference to do a boot repair.

With only one drive attached (The original HDD or the SSD) boot from the Macrium 'recovery drive'.
Use the boot repair on it.

Yes, i had just the HDD. SSD was not connected. i had also made a CD of Macrium's Rescue. because the flash drive had a bug in it and could not run. I ran the CD to fix MBR and select which partition to boot from (System,OS or HP Recovery). I chose 'system'. then Macrium closed and came back to the same screen. ran it a second time and chose ALL boot code options (Reset boot disk ID, replace master boot record,replace partition sector boot code, rebuild the configuration data base) . PC restarted and came back to the same 'restore' screen i was on before. so i started it again and this time chose 'recovery'. I chose all options except "Replace Partition Sector" in boot code options. clicked to restart and screen said "no boot file named". nothing seemed to fix the boot problem and here i am still confused!

I'm sorry but it's very difficult to me to give you instructions on what to do.
Normally you don't have any problem when cloning a disk. I have no idea what happened. It can be that the HDD (source) has failed and now you can't boot from the HDD or the SSD.
Download windows-10-recovery-tools and make a boot able disk (DVD or USB)
With it you may access the HDD and do a disk check.

yes, i can understand the difficulty of not seeing the computer and/or what's happening. i tried the Win 10 recovery tool and the macrium 'rescue'. i tried other programs also. all to no avail. so, i gave up trying to rescue HDD (ED5S). i went to a disk (GQ0T) i cloned on 10-22-19 and had my computer back up and running. i then made a clone of that disk to other bare drives (O3HE) and (NNL9). all of those are working ok. the only things i may have lost were any work i'd done from 10-22 to the present.not such a big deal.

i then cloned (GQ0T) to the SSD. because the HDD was 2TB and the SSD 1TB, i had to resize the partitions. when the clone was finished, only two partitions copied correctly (System and Recovery). the 'C' partition was blank! that's the first time that's ever happened!

this may be a dumb question but on which partition is the 'boot' instructions on.

Something is strange. Your nnl9 disk still has the D: HP factory recover partition (~13GB) but it doesn't have Windows 10 Recovery partition (~600MB).

You did not post the SSD disk manager image. Please post the whole window, expand the columns as I must read the contents of the partitions.

Use the paper clip on the Quick Replay - Advanced. Browse to the image - Upload