Question Migrated M.2 SSD still reads from the original spinning disk as well.

[hulktr]

I bought an "HP Gaming Pavilion 15 series" notebook, disabled the "Intel Optane 16Gb" and replaced it with a "Samsung 970 EVO Plus 250". I used Samsung Migration Tool to copy the "1TB 7200 rpm HDD". I somehow managed to make the M.2 the default boot device.

Here is the problem:
C:\ is the M.2 NVME disk.... D:\ is the original spinning disk.
When boths disks are connected, M.2 boot time, and application launch times are delayed and I hear spinning noises. I'm sure it boots from the M.2... I started to follow disk activity using "Resource Monitor", almost all activites are on the C:\ drive, but it is strange that "System" process sometimes reads 10s of files from D:\Windows\WinSxS etc. Each time I start an Adobe application I see many files are read from the D: drive, which is a spinning disk.

When I disconnect the spinning disk, the M.2 boots in 3-4 seconds, all Adobe applications launch super quickly, so there is no need to read from the spinning disk. So why does the my computer still accesses the old drive and drops my overall disk performance dramatically? I do not want to wipe the original disk because HP requires me to keep the original configuration when I drop the device to a service point. What if I reset Windows 10 on the M.2?

 

[Colif]

a reset won't change the boot info.

Does the hdd show up in the boot order of the bios? If you can remove that entry its likely the PC will only use the nvme.

the hdd would have always been the boot device, since you cloned it, the ssd become it. The optane was likely used as a cache drive to store files used most often by windows, to make hdd seem faster than it actually is.

Ever tried running adobe with just the nvme inside? curious if it has any errors due to it trying to access the hdd that isn't there. It could have the GUID of the hdd stored somewhere (GUID - Global Unique ID. All GPT drives have their own GUID, every drive worldwide has its own number)

 

[hulktr]

Both disks show up in BIOS boot order, but I am unable to change the order or delete any of them, HP does not allow to make these changes. I had to boot without the HDD once to make the M.2 default boot device. I had disabled the Intel Optane before cloning, its entire content was copied to the HDD, I also uninstalled Intel Rapis Storage application. I suspect that M.2 still tries to read some files from the other disk, thinking it is the Optane... Maybe I should boot from USB to install a fresh copy of Windows, this is my last resort as I don't want to face Windows activation problems.

 

[Colif]

What does it show next to Activation in settings/update & security/activation?
You won't have any activation problems reinstalling win 10 on a PC its already been on, just curious if activation linked to your microsoft account or not. It won't make any difference really.

Fresh install should fix it, its just bios will always look at the hdd as 2nd option so if the nvme were to not boot, it would use hdd instead. You could buy another hdd and use it in place of the HP one, then if you ever need to get it serviced you could swap hdd and nvme out and put the original hdd in

I would remove hdd from the laptop when you reinstall windows as it might (not saying it would) see the boot info on hdd when you go to set up Win 10 on nvme and instead of making its own boot sector, use that one.

 

[hulktr]

My activation is linked digitally to my Microsoft account. If a problem occurs I'll boot from the HDD and start from scratch.
I'll try to see how M.2 behaves with another HDD, and then probably reinstall with no HDD attached.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Remove drive letter from D: drive. It will not be accessed anymore.

 

[Il3mendo]

Just perform a clean install of the OS and the first time you boot from the NVMe remove the HDD.

 

[hulktr]

As expected, I removed the HDD, installed a clean Windows on the NVME, after a few restarts I installed the HDD back. No problems now But boot time is affected for a few more seconds, but this must be normal as this is the case on another build of mine.