Huge mistake with optane, am I screwed?

[JJian29]

Hi all, I have a build about a few months old now with a 2TB hard drive running Windows 10 and 32 GB Optane memory, and recently I had an issue where I could not boot after loading. My motherboard is the Z270 MSI Carbon Gaming Pro

Like the idiot I am, I decide to try and fix it myself. I look around the BIOS (since I cannot boot into my windows) and see in the Intel RST section that my disk is disabled for whatever reason. I look around for a way to enable it, and accidentally disabled RST in BIOS. It took me a bit to understand what I just did, but I realize I messed up terribly. I understand that my optane and hard drive were running in RAID-0, and my disabling of RST might have just made it so that the data in both drives is useless. I tried to recreate the raid array, but my optane is greyed out when I try to do so.

Am I screwed? What should I do to get my optane+HDD set up back to what it was, even if it was unable to boot? I'm fine with getting another drive to boot from as long as I can recover my data (if that is possible at all at this point).

[idata]

Hello ireallymessedup,

Thanks for posting in our communities. We understand that you would like to recover the data on your drive after disabling Intel® Optane™ memory from BIOS.Since the system was suffering from boot issues from the start, it'll be hard to tell if disabling Intel Optane Memory would make a difference. Just to make sure, did you disable it from BIOS > Settings > Advanced > Intel(R) Rapid Storage Technology? If so, this shouldn't affect booting.Please describe the symptoms of the original boot errors, and let us know if there has been a difference in behavior after disabling Intel Optane Memory.Best regards,Eugenio F.

[JJian29]

Hi Eugenio,

My drive was having boot issues before and after, and I was in a bit of a panic when I tried disabling it in that method you described, yes.

After doing so, I installed windows on a second drive, installed recovery software and saw that the entire primary hard drive was unallocated, as well as the optane drive. I can't entirely rule out optane being a cause since the status after disabling RST was completely unusable, but it could have been anything.

However luckily Optane was, as advertised, a hard drive cache, and I was able to confirm more or less that everything on Optane existed also in the primary drive still, so there was barely any data loss like I was expecting from a raid-0 configuration.

I got almost all my data back, formatted the original drive and things are back to normal on a fresh install of Windows.

[idata]

Hello ireallymessedup,

Thanks for your reply.We're glad to read you were able to recover most of the data on the drive and also reinstall Windows*. You didn't mess up after all.Best regards,Eugenio F.