Acronis Snap Deploy 5 - "no network interfaces are available"
I hope you all are well. I am working to deploy and image off of a Dell Optiplex 5080 on to another Dell Optiplex 5080. We have the server set up for the deployment and made the bootable media. When we boot off the bootable media, it says "no network interfaces are available" in the agent display. My team researched the issue and the problem appears to be driver related. We are working with Windows 10, so we tried to make a Windows PE bootable drive with the drivers to no avail. We also tried a Linksys WIFI card to see this would be seen and it was not seen. The device has an Intel I219 LM network interface card. Any help on moving forward on this would be greatly appreciated.
We had this issues too, so ended up creating 2 VMs for hosting Acronis Snap deploy. One with Linux PXE image and one with WinPE.
The problem is that i219 LM has new hardware ids in newer motherboards like the Optiplex 5080 (and same issue with Latitude 5x10 and 5x20) and linux kernel used for acronis PXE image doesn't yet know how to deal with them so no driver is loaded.
To create a WinPE image you will need to have latest version of Acronis SD, and install MS ADK and WinPE Add-on for ADK (we used version 1903, not sure if 2004 is supported in Snap Deploy yet) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/get-started/adk-insta…
After that you will need to grab and extract WinPE driver pack from Dell https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-ca/000108642/winpe-10-driver-pack
After you have all of the above, launch "Create PE Image", when it prompts you for additional drivers, point it to the folder where you extracted the driver pack you downloaded from Dell. Be patient here and wait for all the drivers to populate as it may take a long time and may seem like it didn't find any drivers or froze. Fear not, all drivers will show up eventually. Once it starts creating WinPE image, a bunch of cmd windows will open up and close. Sometimes it seems one of these windows is open for too long and it's stuck, click on that window to make it active and press "Enter" and it will carry on. Once PE image has been created and you PXE boot your machines, you will see that the NIC is recognised by Snap Deploy agent and you can finally send the images. By the way PE image created with the dell drivers works on anything, really. We've deployed images to latest Surfaces and HPs.
The Linux PXE image is still preferable though because it boots up much faster and is easier to create, so we would definitely like an update to be released so we don't have to use WinPE at all, even a beta version released on the forum would work. Other things we've noticed you may need to change in Dell machines to get Linux based PXE images to work is to change SecureBoot to disabled and Change SATA mode to AHCI (Dells for some reason come with SATA mode set to RAID, and we had problems with Linux media detecting NVMe drives. After setting this to AHCI, drives were detected).
Good Luck!