Help needed with multiple OS issues after upgrade to windows 10.

Hello. Newbie here and confused like crazy. I am typing this from a friend's laptop as mine has suddenly experienced the Windows 10 BSOD and I cannot do anything with it.

Laptop computer : Dell Inspiron 1545
Operating System: Windows 10 (just recently upgraded to 10 after being bugged by MS for a week and a half after upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit.


Laptop ran super with a new SDD Kingston 120gb hard drive installed about 3 years ago. Ran Vista the entire time up until a few months ago when I upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate. Again, all ran flawlessly. Upgraded from 7 to 10 about a week and a half ago (if that) and today while attempting to log off the laptop, my cursor froze along with the rest of the screen on my desktop.

Had to press the power button to get the computer to shut off as it was frozen solid. When I powered back up, BSOD was present with the message "Your PC ran into a problem, we will restart it for you". It did not restart it though. That message just stayed there and I hit the 'enter' button finally and got it to another page. Tried rebooting multiple times with no luck getting back to Windows. I tried reinstalling and fixing it from the Windows 7 Ultimate Disk and nothing. About 15 minutes into trying to figure this out, it would not even get to the BSOD and would just get to the black screen and state no drive present.

Kept getting the message of no hard drive present until I stuck the Windows 7 install disk back in the dvd drive and now I can get back to the BSOD. Have tried all their prepare suggestions that come with the BSOD, and again, nothing. It just tells me when I try to reinstall Windows 7 to " RESET THIS PC: The drive where Windows is installed is locked. Unlock the drive and try again." Now I have attempted to find out how to do this on Google and I am having no luck at all.

If I remove the Windows 7 disk from the dvd drive, I don't get the BSOD, but get told I have no hard drive. If I keep the disc in the drive, I can reach all the options on the BSOD, but cannot go any further due to the locked hard drive. So I am having no luck at all and am hoping someone can help me get thru this situation as all my photos and files are on the drive and I would like to be able to back up everything (should have done this in the past!!) and then move forward by replacing the SSD drive with a new one and going back to Windows 7 Ultimate and never touching 10 again.

All help would be very much appreciated. Thank you in advance!

This is what I would do if it were my computer.

Purchase a new SSD for it. Replace the existing SSD with a new one, clean install Windows to it (I would do a clean install of Windows 10, I have 11 computers running on Windows 10 flawlessly). But you could also clean install Windows 7 - it's your choice.

Then I would purchase a SATA to USB cable like this one:
Amazon.com: Sata Cable - Lumsing USB 3.0 to SSD / 2.5-Inch SATA Hard Drive Adapter [Optimized For SSD, Support UASP SATA III]: Computers Accessories

Connect the old SSD to a known good computer and see if you can retrieve any data from it. Don't mess with it too much, though. If you can't immediately see the folder structure on the partition(s) that are supposed to be there, then the best option for data recovery would be to take it to a professional. If you want to try data recovery yourself, there are programs for it like this:
MiniTool Power Data Recovery

The biggest thing is, though, is to stop trying to "fix" the SSD, and shift to purely data recovery efforts.