Boot disk not recognized after installing Intel RST (Rapid Storage Technology)

[CheekyMoonkey]

I'll try to keep this brief.

I wanted to upgrade the spinning magnetic disk drive to an ssd. However, seeing that I have an Optane machine, I was concerned that it would be more steps involved, so I followed the advice of some folks who have done this before on the MS Windows forum. They suggested that Optane should be disabled prior to cloning the HD. So I downloaded the Optane RST app from Intel and installed it. At the end of the installation, the app requested a restart. I did not launch the app or make any config changes using the app.

After restart, I get a "boot device not found. please install an operating system..." blue screen/bios error after POST.

F2 diagnostics show all the hardware passes. Bios config looks ok as far as I can tell. Boot options don't show a bootable drive.

Is Optane hosed? Are boot partition and systems files located on the Optane? 

How do I recover?

Thanks

[Grzwacz]

Hi,

Optane is a cache drive.

Try setting the BIOS to AHCI. Remove the Optane NVME drive.

The HP factory config should have had the option to disable Optane in Control panel (Intel RST). This action would have allowed you to boot to the slow platter HDD. The boot info and operating system are on the platter HDD.

Optane sets a modified RST Premium option in the BIOS. The BIOS may be out of sync with the boot loader on the HDD if installing RST again has changed this parameter. 

You should disable Optane before cloning the current config (sans Optane) to a new SSD.

Regards

[Hibb1]

It's 'kind of' like the 16GB optane + mech hdd are striped in RAID 0, and you've broken the array.

Follow what @Grzwacz  said to recover the data, But personally I'd get rid of the 16GB optane drive and install a larger M.2 2280 SSD in its place. Optane is more-or-less pointless, just another thing to break, and SSHD's (hybrid mech + ssd cache built in) were a thing for a while, but are now obsolete.

Keep the mech hdd for 'storage' and get a 256, 512 or 1TB M.2 SSD and install Windows on that.