Chosen Solution
Yesterday I took apart the old family computer so I could save some old pictures onto my ssd. Everything was going good I unplugged my hdd to put the old one in and when I booted I just simply dragged the files over. I think my mistake was accidentally opening the windows folder on the old hdd. Afterwards I turned my pc off to unplug the old hdd and put my other hdd in and ever since then I’ve been stuck in an automatic repair loop when I try to boot windows. I assume it’s a corrupt windows files but I can’t even install windows on my ssd or hdd because when I go through the installation process through a boot USB drive windows can’t detect an ssd or hdd to install windows on. My bios recognizes my ssd and even recognizes it as a boot drive but it changed from an ahci memory type to a raid.
If you have a windows disk or stick, you can reinstall the OS which Im sure you know, but sometimes even that doesnt work when you’ve had this kind of issue. Trying to repartition & format the drive just keeps failing. Windows has issues with recognising and formatting drives, so I dont use Windows for that, i use Linux. You need to wipe the filesystem and start over, Windows will only recognise NTFS filesystem & a few others, but it needs to be installed on NTFS. I’d test the HDD to make sure its not failing, best way is with a linux live CD or usb, something like Ubuntu or Mint is easy to use and free to download. Usually there is a program on there called gparted that is ideal for changing partitions etc. Then wipe the HDD completely using the same disk or USB. You will need to format your HDD as NTFS for windows, but as long as you delete the partitions using the live CD, when you go to install windows again it should format the HDD as NTFS and install with no problems. i should mention that if you were unable to get some of your files, using the live CD you will usually be able to recover them, even if the were deleted or damaged, BUT you must do it before you reinstall Windows. you can use something like TestDisk or PhotoRec to recover files, even if the drive has been formatted. It is only once you start writing to the drive (like installing OS or saving files that you risk overwriting them & then you wont be able to easily recover them. Im not sure WHY this happens sometimes, but its happened to me too and this was what I did to fix it, hopefully it works for you too!
