Okay, I am completely baffled. I've done some searches and apparently I have "home mode in the car" syndrome and saw all these threads about a blown diode and HW replacement etc.

I will say that being a HW guy (encoder replacement was much more straight forward to me than swapping in an SSD) this is ridiculous. I put in my old drive with the old firmware and all functionality returned with 0 issues. Clearly this is a software problem, yet there's many threads on diode replacement and I couldn't find anything pointing to software.

What is the deal here? I have been out of the loop for years and just want to replace my dying mechanical HD with an SSD.

Can I just image my old drive to the SSD? At this point I could care less about losing a few gig to an LBA issue. I just want it to work with no hassle, as I don't have as much time to spend on this as I would like.

Suggestions? Please?