Dell Inspiron 1545 - Postmortem

Symptoms

My mom's laptop of six years (Dell Inspiron 1545) crashed during video streaming and displays the following error when we try to start it up (image from the internet)

We loaded the BIOS and it confirmed that the internal HDD (Hard Disk Drive) cannot be recognized.

Troubleshooting

• Restarted the laptop
• Ran onboard diagnostics which only confirmed the missing internal HDD
• Reseated the internal HDD of the laptop

• Took the laptop HDD and plugged it inside another desktop computer, the desktop did not recognize the HDD. It was probably corrupted beyond recognition.
• Took the desktop's working 2.5 inch SSD (Solid State Drive) and plugged it into the laptop, the laptop did not recognize the SSD

I've seen videos of people upgrading their Dell Inspiron 1545s and swapping the default HDD with an SSD so this should have worked as both this HDD and my SSD use SATA (Serial AT Attachment) interface. When it did not work, I feared that it may not just be the HDD that was problematic, but also the interface it was connecting to inside the laptop. If this was the case, I wanted to use other means of connecting the HDD to the laptop. I was just guessing but USB (Univeral Serial Bus) maybe?

• Connected the HDD to the laptop's USB port using a SATA to USB adapter

This also did not work. I was almost sure that the laptop was broken beyond self-repair but I was willing to try swapping the HDD with another 2.5 inch HDD. I did not have any at the moment and had to order one online (WD Black 320GB Performance Mobile Hard Disk Drive).

The replacement HDD arrived after a few days. I swapped it in and lo and behold, the laptop recognized it!

Conclusion

I still don't know some things from this postmortem - What triggered the HDD corruption (was it old age?); Why the laptop did not recognize the SSD (was the laptop using some different kind of SATA controller that does not support SSDs?). The old HDD is now corrupted beyond recognition and cannot be recovered without professional help. The laptop is now using its new HDD with a fresh install of Windows 10 and is back to normal (link to fresh install of Windows).