Solved Upgrade From HDD To SSD Questions.

Mitch said:

Is it the case that when I changed from RAID to AHCI, this was disabled before?

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What little I know about optane would fit in a thimble so I hope others more familiar with it will step in. The only thing I know for sure is optane won't work without IRST.
But from looking at your disk management, I believe while you may have disabled optane in the IRST User interface and changed your disk mode to AHCI before you clean installed, you did not disable optane in bios and/or physically uninstall the optane module. When you clean installed , the install process recognized that the optane drive was present and created that space at the end of the HDD as pairable space and shows the optane drive in disk management as unallocated . Therefore, windows still recognizes the optane module to be present because it physically is.
Open device manager, expand "storage controllers" What storage controllers are present?.

To add to this, when you change out the 1 tb hdd to either a smaller or larger ssd, you will have to manually resize your partitions during the Marium restore. You would not want to restore the 1.06 gb or the 12.73 gb partitions.

You could eliminate the unnecessary intermediate step of making an image by using diskgenius (free version) OS Migration.

Hi glasskuter, Thanks a lot for replying. You are absolutely correct. When I did the clean install I simply changed SATA mode from Raid to AHCI and reinstalled Windows. Device Manager shows both the 1TB HDD and the 16GB Optane drives. I will be replacing the 1TB HDD with a 1TB SSD so not too worried about space. I'm happy to leave the Optane drive installed but am unclear if switching from Raid to AHCI (the only 2 options in BIOS) negates the need to deal with Optane further? I wanted to be sure the PC will boot if I simply leave things as they are and change the HDD to SSD. Grateful for any help.

Mitch said:

I'm happy to leave the Optane drive installed but am unclear if switching from Raid to AHCI (the only 2 options in BIOS) negates the need to deal with Optane further?

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I believe so, but if it were me, while the laptop cover is open, before replacing the hdd drive I would remove the optane module and boot from the hdd to make sure I could still boot. If so leave the optane module out of the laptop and replace the drive. But, that's just me. If I have hardware in my system that is not in an enabled state, I don't want it in there.

Hi glasskuter, This is my first real attempt at PC upgrade (RAM excepted) and I'm wary about making a wrong move. I would prefer to err on the side of caution until the SSD is installed. If the PC will boot as is I'm happy to leave it there redundant and look at it again when up and running.Thanks again.

I downloaded the Intel Storage Mgmt app and under Optane there was a message saying that Optane is not compatible with AHCI. I disabled the Optane drive in BIOS and removed the module and everything is OK. I suppose Dell's instructions only apply to Raid mode and not when the user has modified the SATA configuration to AHCI. I'll go ahead and replace the HDD. Thanks again.