Booting in UEFI or Legacy mode didn’t work either.Īfter chasing my own tail for a couple of days, I ended up ordering and waiting for an HDD rack to ship. And told me the same thing about NTFS partition. If I was able to go a step further, I stumbled into a different mind-boggling error. Windows 10 didn’t like the MBR or GPT version of the drive. I also learned I was chasing my own tail. Plenty of people who wanted to upgrade their laptops to SSDs experienced the same issues.

I quickly discovered I wasn’t alone dealing with these issues. The clean Windows 10 installation would not proceed, forcing me to search my way out of the issues I encountered. I then went on to strip off all the components that blocked my access to the hard drive and swapped it with the SSD. I quickly found a teardown video of that laptop model just as I was backing up sensitive data to a different drive. It was on a Sunday morning that I informed them that the laptop wouldn’t be available for a few hours. I got my external hard drives for data backup, got those tiny screwdrivers a laptop needs, and not one, but two bootable Windows 10 thumb drives.

Having performed the same type of laptop surgery on my MacBook Pro years ago, when SSDs were even more expensive than they are now, I knew everything I had to do.

Fresh install of windows 10 on ssd