Context – My father has a struggling 2012ish HP ENVY Ultrabook 4-1130us that he uses for personal computing and taxes (he has to keep this tax software intact)
The Goal - is to upgrade my father’s HP ENVY Ultrabook 4-1130us (2012ish) that has a 32gb SSD and a 500gb HDD to a Samsung EVO 860 500gb SSD.
My Initial Solution – Simply clone the main HDD with Samsung’s migration software, power down and swap the drives.
Result – After the swap, the system booted into windows the first time. I powered down and fully reassembled the laptop. On the second boot I got a recovery screen, it did not make it windows log in screen. From the recovery screen I got option to go to an Intel Rapid Storage Tech menu in the bios and the option to reset disks to non-RAID.
The Issue – Turns out that the 32 SSD is partitioned and in RAID 0. One partition is a striped and the other is a cache. After reinstalling the 500 HDD and booting into Windows the Intel Rapid Storage Tech application showed the cache as an accelerator for the main HDD. In file explorer --> drive C --> properties --> hardware it lists both the 500gb HDD and the 32gb SSD…which makes me think the striped partition on the 32SSD is part of the drive C and may be critical to the OS.
My Question Is – If I reinstall the cloned new SSD and reset the disks to non-RAID in the bios menu will I lose critical OS related files/data on that striped partition of the 32gb SSD and brick the system? or Can I recover/rebuild the OS from a Win 10 installation media USB and not lose anything?
My Second Question – Is there another way to achieve my goal? e.g. Fresh install of Win 10 on new SSD then restore from an ISO image of the original C drive?
Additional info – I have found some information for HP’s with this small SSD accelerator configuration and they are all related to disabling the RAID and doing a fresh OS install…This does not apply because I need to keep the original OS and Software.