Hard Drive Fails Boot on Win10 PC

This past week, I was working on a hardwired smoke alarm in the lower level of my home. In order to connect the smoke alarm to AC power, I had to shut off power to the circuit. Since I was working downstairs, I decided to turn off the Windows XP computer I have down there. It took several tries to find the right power circuit to turn off, as the circuit box isn't marked very well. After the smoke alarm was connected, I went upstairs and found that power had also been shut off to some of the upstairs rooms. 

One of those rooms had a PC running Windows 10. When I tried to turn the computer back on, it would not boot. I've always heard that you should shut your computer off during a thunder storm, well this is one of the reasons why. The computer would only go to the Bios screen with a warning that it couldn't find a boot device. At first the hard drive was making a buzzing noise, which indicates that the heads may be stuck to the platter. I opened the drive (not recommended) and saw that the heads were in the parked position. When I reinstalled the drive, it was now making clicking noises. This 1 TB Toshiba hard drive was done. We didn't have a lot of important data on the drive. But, its never fun setting everything up again.

This was our only Windows 10 PC. It is mainly used for web browsing, photo editing, email, webcam meetings, and printing. I decided to order a Samsung 870 EVO 250GB SSD for $44.99. Before the new drive arrived, I downloaded the latest version of Windows and tried to load it onto a 16GB USB stick. The problem I ran into was that the latest version of Win 10 (1809) has files that are too big to fit onto a FAT32 formatted USB drive. An individual file can not be larger than 4GB. I also found out that Windows XP cannot format a USB drive to NTFS. The only option is to install exFAT support on XP with update KB955704. Since Microsoft ended support for XP in 2014, you can no longer find the update file on their website, but it can be found elsewhere.

I proceeded to format the USB with exFAT and was able to copy the necessary installation files to the drive and verified that it was an MBR bootable drive. When the SSD arrived, I installed it, inserted the USB drive, and pushed the power button. The computer recognized the SSD and was attempting to read the USB drive, but then went back to the Bios screen. I tried adjusting the boot settings to legacy mode, but nothing worked. My last resort was to use an unopened retail version of Windows 10 Pro that I had been saving to upgrade my old XP computer. I opened the package and found what looked like a disposable USB (see photo). I inserted the USB into the computer and it started the installation process. 

During the load, I did not setup WiFi access. My concern was that it was an older version of Windows 10, which would require a lot of updates. I had also read that a retail version of Windows would not activate automatically and I didn't want to use my activation code on this install if I didn't have to. After Windows was installed, the next thing I did was insert the USB I made with the latest version and reinstalled Windows again. Windows 10 had no problem reading the exFAT formated USB drive. After the second install, I turned on WiFi and logged into my Microsoft account. There were only a few updates and the software activated automatically. Since then, the computer has been running well and I've been using the Microsoft Edge browser instead of Google Chrome. The Edge browser has undergone a lot of improvements since I last tried it.