Data recovery from Intel Optane SSD

[smartiro]

Hello,

The Windows OS on my relative's HP Spectre x360 15-eb0043dx laptop crashed lately and is not booting anymore. It's trying to diagnose and repair upon booting the the OS, but unsuccessful. I tried manually repairing it by running some command-line commands, didn't help. Reverting back recent Windows updates doesn't work either. Also, it's not able to recover from installation media. Basically, I think I have exhausted all options available through the recovery menu that I know off.

I have decided to remove the NVME SSD storage from the laptop, put it into an enclosure, connect to another laptop to copy the personal files. After connecting the enclosure to another laptop, I noticed that the drive didn't mount and appeared as a disk. It's showing in disk management as GPT Protective Partition and not getting mounted and drive letter assigned.

So, long story short, I've discovered that the SSD in the laptop is an Intel Optane drive, so that's why it was not getting mounted as regular SSD or HDD. I learned that the Optane feature can be disabled in order to convert the cached SSD into a regular SSD storage, and the proper way of doing this is to disable the feature in the Windows Intel Rapid Storage Technology (IRST) software first, and then disable it in BIOS. Since my Windows OS is damaged and cannot boot, my question is if I disable Optane in BIOS with the "Preserve user data" checkbox checked, will this reliably do the conversion of the storage into regular SSD without data loss? I just need to copy the data out of the drive first and then decide what to do with the laptop later.

Any advice here is much appreciated. Thank you in advance.