Adding 500 tb ssd to my Laptop with 1tb + 16gb ssd Cache drive

[WyethEarl]

I have a HP 15 da0053wm on hand and I was planning to upgrade its SSD to 500gb (existing 16gb SSD cache drive in the slot).

the problem is that, when I removed it and installed the 500gb SSD in the slot, installed fresh windows  10 on SSD, the 1tb Hard drive that was present on the laptop was not being detected.

I presumed that because the drives (1tb HDD +16 gb SSD cache drive) was merged, it was disabled when one drive was not present. 

Knowing that,

a.) How can i use my 1tb HDD as an extra storage with my 500gb SSD?
b.) In addition to that, i was planning to clone the contents of the drive 1+2 (1tbHDD+16gbssd) to the 500gb SSD,

Hope for a fast response to my problem.

[Huffer]

The way it should have been done was to disable the Optane acceleration in  Intel Rapid Storage app before removing the 16 gb Optane module. You might still be able to do that if you put the Optane back in and see if the system will still boot to the 1 TB HDD with Optane acceleration. If so, that is the time to do the clone but it is going to have to be done by making a backup image to some kind of external device and then use that to restore to the new 500 gb SSD. I think it is likely the 1 TB hdd was altered if you installed Windows with the new 500 gb SSD and the original 1 TB HDD in the machine at the same time. If so the opportunity to clone may have been lost. Have you looked for the 1 TB HDD in disk management or the diskpart command? I suspect it is till there but is not mounted and initiated by itself as it previously was "merged" as you say with the 16 gb Optane module. It could be formatted and reinitiated but obviously you would then lose the data on it. Post back with any more questions or observations, please

[WyethEarl]

I have reinstalled the 16ssd back and it still works fine as before.
So, the opportunity to clone is still there.

i am not currently using the 500gb SSD because my files are still in the drive.

Do i just simply clone my system to the 500gb drive? and when it is done set it as a boot device?

can you give me a step by step instruction in doing this?

[Huffer]

Generally a clone requires that the source and target disks be connected to the same computer at the same time. For you this is not possible because the slot for the new SSD is occupied by the 16 gb Optane. So unless you get an external USB M.2 adapter the best way to do this is to get an external hard drive big enough to hold all the contents of what you have on the 1 TB disk now. Do a system image either using built in Windows features or a third party backup program like Acronis, etc. Then take the 1 TB and the 16 gb out and place the 500 gb in the computer and restore to the 500 gb from the backup (image) you made.