Cloning a corrupted hard drive doesn’t work. Reinstall Windows from scratch and try identifying files you want to save from the bad drive (if you can boot and see them to copy).
Boot from a CD or the other working drive and then use file manager to view the non-booting drive.
There are free downloadable Linux CD/DVD images which let you view Windows volumes.
Never bothered with SSDs - have only had one HD crash and that was from a off-balance CD that shook it to death in short order - current HD is 8 years old and humming smooth.
If the computer was an older model, it's likley the BIOS needed to be updated to be able to accepts all the Win10 updates - I hjave a year+ old laptop that I had to do some BIOS updates on to make it fully compatible with the Win10 updates even though it came with Win10.
Good luck
Another vote for Acronis TrueImage here, but please note that it’s not freeware. Any freeware other than dd is not going to be trustworthy.
Also, SSDs are fine as primary drives, but you MUST, MUST, MUST have real-time incremental backups! In my experience, the average life of an SSD is roughly two years. When an SSD fails, it fails catastrophically, like flipping a switch. That’s why your backup plan is critical.
Also, leave a little room at the end of each disk volume unallocated (not formatted). The SSD can utilize it to swap it for “sectors” (memory chips) which are slowly going bad. There are already some in reserve you can’t see, but not many.
I put an ssd in as a boot drive and it seemed to be fine until major update time. I used acronis to clone the old hdd but version level updates wouldn’t take. The partions weren’t set in the right order.
And yet another vote for Acronis.
Institute a backup routine. I am using Macrium Reflect to perform incremental backups to another machine, a NAS.
Why are you limiting your software search to Free?
Hardware is not free. Why do you think that software should be free?
I haven't used a CD in years. They have gone the way of the floppys before them. I rarely use a DVD as well. I xfer data over the network, or wireless, or use memory sticks/cards.
With multiple drives, you can have multiple, bootable drives of differing OSs. Just select which is the boot drive in your BIOS.
I’ve heard that Acronis can be pricey. I use an “engineered” version of Clonezilla at work— GPartEd which is Linux based. We don’t have an image server to PXE boot from so this is what I came up with.
Also yeah, a no no to clone a corrupt drive.
SSDs seem convenient but they are generally smaller in size than standard HDDs, unless you want to pay quite a bit more.
I’ve had a few of these get zotted in tablets. And if you want to put one into an existing laptop that has the standard 2.5” HDD, then you have to update the BIOS or you’ll get “invalid partition table.”
With GPartED you just need two usb drives
SSD’s are nice, fast, and if they get damaged internally by a chi going bad, they are unrecoverable.
Windoze 10 has nothing to do with any of that.
It is the nature of the SSD device. The spinning disks can be recovered unless the bearings seize.
Your user data should be stored/backed up to a NAS or removable media. Ditto your ISO’s of any software you have on CD/DVD disk.
You should also have a bootable USB stick for recovery of your PC and create a backup image of your system at first boot, and then another image generated at a later date that includes your installed software.
save for later
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI ) is the successor to that, and UEFI can support remote diagnostics and repair of computers, even with no operating system installed
You can get a USB optical drive for under 25.00
Your problem however, may be with memory or the motherboard. Create or buy a Linux live copy, which you can run off a USB flash drive by which you should be able to see Windows files. However, uness you use Knoppix or Puppy Linux buy on USB if you want may not allow you to edit files therein.
If Bitlocker is enabled, you will not be able to clone, no matter what software you use.
I have been using the free version of Macrium Reflect successfully for years. You can save an image of your drive to USB flash drives or USB hard drives and also load the recovery program from a USB flash drive by booting from that drive. It has never let me down.
Bkmk 4l8r
Never clone a problem computer. You may be cloning the problem.
Try doing a System Image Backup (Control Panel, File History, bottom left)
Windows 10 is as big a disaster as the Democrat Party!
If you have all your data recovered from the ssd try installing Linux Mint on and see what happens
When I used win10( on 2 desktops and 3 Laptops) I noticed the hard drive would run at 100% for a long time at bootup and nothing I did would fix it