Win 10 won't boot, recovery steps will not run

Please mark this thread as Solved

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For future reference:
Windows can be installed in two ways: Legacy-MBR or UEFI-GPT
To install as Legacy-MBR you must boot the installation drive as Legacy
To install as UEFI-GPT you must boot the installation drive as UEFI.

If you have a new MB, you should install as UEFI-GPT
Detach any other drives (SATA or Power cable) from the MB.

During POST, press F12(?) to launch the boot menu. You will see two options for the USB drive. USB UEFI (Name) and USB (Name). Select USB UEFI (Name).
Go to install and delete ALL partitions on the SSD till you have one and only one unallocated space and then proceed.
If you don't want to use MS account, don't enable updates or connect to the internet during installation.

Should I mark this thread as solved? It's solved as having trouble with an old car is solved by getting a new one. I still don't know what caused the original inability to boot and in the end I never could get the boot to work on the malfunctioning drive. What say ye?

Another thing to mention. Now that I am back up on Win10 with a new drive, I tried the EaseUS program called PCTrans which claims to be able to transfer apps from an old drive to a new one (running the same OS). You select the drive from which you want to take the apps, a list of apps on that drive appears and you simply select the ones you want to move to your new drive and away you go. But for me, the list of apps is empty. The program doesn't work as advertised and I am using a known good Win10 HD as the source drive.

I tried it out a while ago and it seemed to do a decent job transferring 3rd party programs.

IIrc it finds 3rd party programs on your current running system, which can then be transferred to a .pct file.

Then on the new system browse to the .pct file and select which to transfer into your new system

Thanks SIW2.

I think I'm cooked because the drive I am attempting to transfer the apps from is, I just discovered (and in keeping with the subject of this thread) not bootable though it was produced by cloning a bootable drive with Reflect back when all was sunny skies about two months ago . Not being bootable means the old drive can't be booted as needed to create the .pct file you mention. This is not my good week! Everything is present on the unbootable drive, I've put in a help request to EaseUS and perhaps they will have a solution.

I now have...

>A new 1tB SSD with a fresh Win10 install running fine (thank you, Amazon, for the freebie).
>The old 1tB SSD that was the subject of this thread that remains unbootable but is still accessible for files (I just transferred my old desktop to my new one from it).
> A good 1tB HD that was cloned from the now unbootable SSD a couple of months ago that now turns out to be unbootable as well, but with all files accessible.

I wish it was like the good old days of Norton Utilities when one could easily make a disk bootable. Long ago as that was, it seems that the basic idea remains the same though my attempts have been unsuccessful. But, on the plus side, this is forcing me to learn about new things such as as UEFI and GPT that I understand will be the default with Win11.

I was trying to use the method they suggest of having the donor drive on the same system as the recipient, but it could not work with the donor drive being unbootable, as mine was.

BTW, now that I have three SSD's I decided to run a read speed test on them expecting to see uniformity as happened with one of them, the third one shown below. The other two show quite a bit of variation, surprising me. The KingFast SSD (first graph shown) is the one that went down on me.