I was using an HP Pavilion Desktop that had the Intel Optane SSD synched with a Toshiba SATA drive. The customer just bought it 4 weeks earlier and had gone through the Office 365 add and other data recovery jobs to get all the working files and Outlook going. The move was from an older slower Win 10 machine to this faster one.
It stopped booting and displayed the HP messages to try different function keys for Recovery, Setup and the like. Once HP was contacted and the standard tests done, the RMA was made to ship it back to them to fix. Great service, but what about the data.
The Optane SSD and the Toshiba HD normally synch so that often used data is cached in the much faster solid-state memory. There are complex software algorithms to keep the data safely on the disk or SSD. Then the power blinks.
At that point, the data on the spinning disk and the data in the SSD cache cannot release each other from a fatal embrace made by the synch keys no longer matching.
The faux RAID feature of the Optane is used to pipeline the data to each volume; be it spinning or SSD. Its driver must already be in the Windows 10 install media used to recover the machine. But there is one last impossible problem.
Your data cannot be accessed until Windows installs on the drive. It refuses to do so when the install process runs. It will also destroy the drive contents as it installs.
The machine must have a healthy Windows 10 environment running before the RSTSetup resetting software, which brings the drive back into volume and data synchronization, can be run.
There is no tool to do this prior to Windows 10 installation attempts. Failure is due to the Optane and hard disk refusal to be altered until their volumes are synchronized.
Data is lost. That is bad. The inability to save it somehow is even worse.
Bernard Lambert – November 25, 2020