I have an old Dell Inspiron 15R N5110 laptop and I wanted to upgrade it so that it'll be faster and give it to my parents to use - so I didn't want to spend that much. I have found out that the main reason these old laptops are slow, is that they run on HDD and that I should upgrade to an SSD. But since my old laptop didn't have a dedicated SSD slot, I should have replaced my CD/DVD ROM with the new SSD. So I have bought the following for the upgrade from Amazon:
Then I proceeded with the hardware upgrade and successfully replaced the CD/DVD ROM with the new SSD and I confirmed that the laptop recognized the SSD being added.
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Now it was time to install the Windows. I downloaded the Windows 10 x64 .iso
file from Microsoft's official servers and used Rufus software to write it on a USB flash drive.
At first, I used these settings in Rufus with GPT enabled and Quick Format unchecked to write the Windows on the flash, but then I got a black dotted screen on my laptop. After a little research, I came across this question on SuperUser and found out that that was possibly an improper display of this screen.
I double-checked my BIOS to make sure if it's UEFI and Secure Boot compatible or not and it didn't have any of those options. So I re-wrote the flash with these settings in Rufus, this time with MBR enabled and Quick Format unchecked again.
I powered on my laptop, pressed F12 to go to Boot Options, chose USB Flash Drive, pressed a key to boot into it, and I saw the Windows 10 installation procedure. I saw my SSD there and I chose it as the destination for the Windows to be installed. Windows was installed successfully on the SSD and my laptop got restarted.
Now the problem is that every time I try to boot into my SSD (which is named after the previous CD/DVD ROM in BIOS Boot Options) I see this blue screen as an error which says:
RECOVERY:
Your PC/Device needs to be repaired
The application or operating system couldn't be loaded because a required file is missing or contains errors.
File:\WINDOWS\system32\winload.exe
Error code: 0xc000000e
You'll need to use recovery tools. If you don't have any installation media (like a disc or USB device), contact your PC administrator or PC/Device manufacturer.
Press Enter to try again
Press F8 for Startup Settings
I have researched this issue and have tried some of the solutions given, but none of them worked. I am now stuck and cannot run Windows 10 on the new SSD I installed on this laptop.
Thanks to all the help from the comments under my question, I finally managed to fix the issue successfully. So I'm gonna share what is the exact solution as patkim correctly suggested:
...generally when you install Windows especially as MBR with more than one physical disk present during installation, the MBR / bootloader may get installed in the first Disk (SATA0) even if you select SATA1 disk free space or a partition for installation. Such config might create boot issues. I would recommend keeping only one disk during installation (Preferably at SATA0 which could be the location of the original HDD that came with the laptop, just as @Keltari mentioned), check if everything is ok or not and then proceed with adding another secondary disk.
So basically what I did was that I swapped the SSD with the HDD. I opened my laptop (with the help of this video) and got the HDD from under my motherboard and then put it inside the caddy, then I put the SSD where the HDD was (under the motherboard on my laptop).
This fixed my issue. I hope everyone else who encounters a similar issue finds this solution helpful.
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