I am in a bit of a pickle. I am trying to help a friend upgrade a laptop to Windows 10 with a Crucial SSD, and have been unable to get things working as they should. The specific laptop is a 15-inch Dell Inspiron 5000. It was made a few months ago, and it came with a 5400 RPM HDD. It came with A07 bios (or whatever the number is for a bios release made prior to Win 10's launch.) It originally had Win 7 Pro, but was updated to Win 10 PRIOR to cloning because of how Microsoft's user licensing works with Win7/8/8.1-->10 upgrades.
So I started out trying to use Macrium to clone the hard (C) drive to the SSD. However, while the application load times were almost instantaneous as should be with most SSDs, a cold bootup would take 3+ minutes. I updated drivers, ensured this was not an issue with a single program launching at startup, and have played with the fast boot options found on Win 8/10. No improvement.
I think this has to do with the setup regarding Bios vs UEFI, and master boot record vs gpt. It
The OEM HDD used master boot record and legacy bios to load. So when I cloned to the SSD this all carried over. It appears that for this SSD, optimal performance will come using a GUID partition map and UEFI instead of legacy bios, and possibly secure boot.
So then I tried cloning the HDD's C partition to the SSD after the SSD was changed using DiskPart to a GUID partition map. After doing, I updated the bios for UEFI and attempted to start the computer. However, it would not load and did not identify the drive as being bootable, regardless of specific UEFI settings. Thinking it may have been the bios revision, I reflashed the bios to the most recent release…but no dice.
I know I am missing something here. The only other thing I can think of is doing a fresh install of Windows 10, letting the OS find whatever drivers it may need, and manually install any drivers not updated automatically.
So what do you suggest I do at this point?