Hard Drive Died, Took Windows with it... Somehow, Need some help

Hardware Hub Storage
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Okay I will cop to clickbait, the “somehow” how is this. The PC has 3 Drives:
An SSD with the OS on it,
A (Dead) 500GB HDD with all the information and other stuff on it,
A 2 TB Game drive.

The history is that the OS used to be on the 500GB drive and was moved to the SSD. after this windows annoyingly always had two option for the OS both win10 but on different drives. (I had recommended a fresh install at the time but was not a runner).

The set up was the OS on the SSD and user files on the 500GB drive after the SSD was installed. It is these user files I want to get back. The drive makes not good noises, trying to spin up and read and failing. The death was pretty sudden, started with a not good ticking and then windows freezing and then failure to boot. At the time all programs reported drive heath as good for what thats worth.

The dead drive has been unplugged but the PC now asks for boot media… guess the MBR was on the dead drive. So currently the PC does nothing at all rather than just being down a drive.

I fired up Ubuntu to poke around the SSD and see if anything is obviously amiss. It is all there as expected minus the user files.

So is there a way to get windows to boot the OS on the SSD? Recovery menu, boot disk, repair option?

It has been made clear that total reinstall is the future, but if files can be saved that would be amazing, though I fear unlikely as all the stuff was on the now dead drive.

There is a new drive on the way to replace the old one. So there is a little time before we can do a proper reinstall anyway, so in that time we are trying to salvage the situation.

I think that is all I know, though I am sure I have left glaring details out so ask away.

Yes, yes, I know backups… I know. was not my personal PC yet. Still intending to build a nas, all I need is the drives really.

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unplug the ssd and place the bad drive in a plastic bag with cabling connected and place between 2 bags of ices or cold packs ( of course towelling to absorb any water from melting ice.)
boot with ubuntu live cd or usb
this might allow you to use ubuntus file manager to recover the files on the bad drive. copy them onto a separate drive or usb sticks.
once a drive starts being noisy its not long to remain alive and should be backed up immediately.
there are other distros that can give you better recovery tools but if you want the powerful ones then you are delving into the realm of digital forensics.
kali, caine linux, cyborg hawk, are three of the more powerful ones ive used but are not recommended unless you have a good amount of experience with linux
caine would be by far easier than the other two.

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Oh interesting. So have it cold while trying to start up. Okay, I can definitely give that a go.

Would it be worth/possible to have the drive disconnected before start up to give it the best chance at the most time running?

EDIT: Thinking ahead before I do anything, should I get access to it, how would I go about the quickest and most effective recovery of important data.

and better yet where is the MBR or what ever I need to get the SSD to be bootable at least. If i only get long enough to lift that it would be useful.

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direct copying is the first method to try
but you can use dd or clonezilla to clone the drive to another drive or partition of equal size but this may take quite a while.
any time a drive is erratic the error checking function takes a lot longer for verifying file integrity.
hence the importance of keeping frequent backups ( saves a lot of work and in many cases the cost of a recovery service.)
with the onset of large capacity hdd/sdd people get out of the habit of doing backups but if the data is important then it vital to backup regularly.
for my server the os drive has been cloned to 2 separate replacement drives
this practice has saved me countless hours of downtime and reconfiguration!
just remove defunct drive and jack the replacement in, boot and go!

for the ssd you can use gparted to copy the mbr but its most likely to erase the index of the ssd.
in this instance its better to re install the os to the ssd and use its mbr.

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i think you should be able to just grub install on the SSD, not 100% with the whole uefi thing M$ has going to, but worth a shot, maybe you’d atleast be able to boot from your ssd.
test disk works wonders for data retrieval, just be patient if the drive is botched.

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I just went through a re-install of w10. Since my OS disk was w8, I ran that to get an OS on my system, and punched in my old key. Then I grabbed a w10 ISO- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10 - and put it on a usb. Then in bios, I set my pc to boot from the usb.
It is possible just with the windows you had re-installed on another drive, some of your data might come off that bad drive. It just might not be healthy enough to boot your pc.
A year ago I asked the same question on this forum about a laptop drive. I installed Ubuntu and was able to recover some pictures and documents(Thanks Forum!). It wasn’t everything, but it was alot of it.
But in my case, it wasn’t the drive dying.
If it is an old hdd, have you thought of buying another one just like it, but switching out the disk’s? Even some used one off of ebay might work? Not sure how that works, but it might preserve everything.

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I was thinking about swapping the drive parts but that is very last ditch.

I will try put win10 on a. USB as well and see if it can repair the boot or at least give access to the ssd for a bit.

But yes full reinstall is how its gonna be.

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Oooohhhhh boy! Looked into data recovery… $900-1300 ish so yeah… No.

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Windows likes to install a boot loader on another drive during installation. I’d recommend trying to use a grub rescue disk, or a windows rescue disk.

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now i didn’t read the whole thread…

step 1: *if its boot
get windows installation on usb/cd whatever… go into repair option

quick fix… just install new mbr, and mount it to your current partition…
its like 2-3 commands

step 2: page/swap file still there on dead partition?
you will have to edit registry (repair option again… type in regedit, and load hive ~ you can find your registry files here: %SystemRoot%\system32\config
(systemroot refers to your windows folder on ssd.)
here’s location you will be looking for
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\MemoryManagement

just change location of the page file to reflect to your windows partition or just leave empty.

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Thank you @section279 and @anon5205053 those are very helpful. I will update this a bit more when I get some time to work on it.

The new drive should be here soon either way.