Problem upgrading Inspiron to Win 10 with new SSD - need fresh ideas!

I am in a bit of a pickle. I am trying to help a friend upgradea laptop to Windows 10 with a Crucial SSD, and have been unable to get thingsworking as they should. The specific laptop is a 15-inch Dell Inspiron 5000. Itwas made a few months ago, and it came with a 5400 RPM HDD. It came with A07bios (or whatever the number is for a bios release made prior to Win 10'slaunch.) It originally had Win 7 Pro, but was updated to Win 10 PRIOR tocloning because of how Microsoft's user licensing works with Win7/8/8.1-->10upgrades.

So I started out trying to use Macrium to clone the hard (C)drive to the SSD. However, while the application load times were almostinstantaneous 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 programlaunching at startup, and have played with the fast boot options found on Win8/10. 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. Sowhen 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 oflegacy bios, and possibly secure boot.

So then I tried cloning the HDD's C partition to the SSD afterthe SSD was changed using DiskPart to a GUID partition map. After doing, Iupdated the bios for UEFI and attempted to start the computer. However, itwould not load and did not identify the drive as being bootable, regardless ofspecific UEFI settings. Thinking it may have been the bios revision, Ireflashed the bios to the most recent release…but no dice.

I know I am missing something here. The only other thing I canthink of is doing a fresh install of Windows 10, letting the OS find whateverdrivers it may need, and manually install any drivers not updatedautomatically.

So what do you suggest I do at this point?

Did you clone only the Windows partition and not the partition containing the boot files (BCD)?

Not an expert in this area, but I think it is problematic if you try to copy a volume from a GPT partitioned disk onto an MBR partitioned disc. If you are cloning a disk, I think the partition type of the target has to be identical to the source. I would suggest going back to the beginning and try the clone operation with another product (like Acronis). Clone the entire disk. I would also keep the firmware settings the same as they were originally (i.e. don't change the firmware from BIOS to UEFI before the clone operation).