Warning to others migrating your OS to a SSD

Very true, you learn in the computer industry never trust or assume anything, test, test, test.

Which is why you make a backup with a known good solution and test it.

I have done this procedure many times for myself and many people. Installing SSD or a new drive. I never had an issue, because I always had a good working copy of their system. It makes it easier if you take the drive out of the system you are working on, back it up on another system, that way there is little to no chance of mistakes or user error, or much reduced anyway, I have not lost any data so far.

There is only one way to success and to prevent catastrophe. You MUST have a verified backup of your system and all the partitions, including the dell partitions that you know you can restore and tested it. This way no matter how bad you mess things up, or how bad things go wrong, you can get right back to where you were, start over and try a different method to say install a new SSD to your system.

I bought several HP laptops and gave them as gifts, none of them came with the OS disk, you had to create the recovery disk. I did not trust them. What I trusted was me, taking the disk out of the laptop, making a backup on a different machine then putting the drive back into the laptop, then creating the recovery disks, sending the recovery disks, sending a copy of the backup to the user and keeping a copy of the backup myself. Therefor, no matter what is done, they have three ways to get back to where they started. 2 I know for sure to work

I feel bad for you and sorry you had problems, I agree, the Dell recovery should have worked, you should not have to purchase the disks from them. I sometimes think they do this so they can make more money at your data and time loss expense, but hard to prove that.

Remember, the key to happy computing is to have a good backup that has been verified with the program that made it and then tested to make sure it sees all your drives during the restore and is able to restore to your system. If not, you run your computer under the false illusion that you can get back to where you were with little down time. Good luck to you.