I am pretty sure the boot sector of the SSD was not damaged.
Shortly after returning the SSD, my system wouldn't boot from
the spinning disk either. It turns out the bios had decided
to boot from a system drive that had no boot sector information.
The motherboard is an ASUS and the drive priority sometimes
wanders around among the drives. This behavior seems to
follow whenever I use F8 to boot from something other than
the highest priority drive.