Predator Orion 7000 prebuilt - SMART Error Detection - Hard Drive Replacement

Good afternoon,

I have an Acer Predator Orion 7000 prebuilt (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QT6R382?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title). This device has two hard drives, a Motherboard attached M.2 SSD (1tb), and a 2GB Toshiba in the hard drive bay.

I recently received a smart error detection during boot up, and so i downloaded HDDscan to investigate. HDD scan reported a Smart Error on the M.2 Micron, and returned a green state on the Toshiba (though 005 was red). At this point the PC is still running, with only an occasional stutter, but i have performed an entire back up via BackBlaze to be safe.

With this in mind i then began to physically troubleshoot. I removed the M.2 and still received the boot up error. I replaced the M.2 and removed the toshiba and now i have no error.

I acquired a new SSD and have installed it with no issues. I'm prepared to reinstall windows on it in the interest of being cautious, but I'm having a few issues proceeding.

Question 1: Which Hard Drive is the problem?

Both seems unlikely, but one is responsible for the bios error and the other device is reporting smart error on HDD scan. I'm flummoxed.

Question 2: Why won't my PC detect my Flash Drive that I prepared the windows 11 install media on?

I've tried multiple usb slots (all known to work), and the device always shows up in the devices and drives when the computer is on so i can't figure out why its not registering when i try to use it boot up and initialize my new SSD.

As previously noted, I have full back ups so I'm riding this out for now, but I would prefer to proactively address the issue before one of (or both) of the drives collapse.