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Cyber Protect Home Doesn't Recognize NVME Drive

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When ever I get a new laptop I try and do an Acronis backup from an .iso bootable drive to save the initial load.  It always works except now. I got a new Acer A15 that has a WD drive but shows as HDD(OPAL)(disabled). I have tried a WinPE USB drive and one made with Rufus. They both recognize all drives except the internal NVME. There is no RAID setup nor ACHI evident from the BIOS to switch to. I went ahead and installed Win11 Home and again tried it but still it doesn't recognize the drive. Acronis has always worked with secure boot but this OPAL is something different. Bitlocker is not installed. Anyone else run into this before?

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Anthony,

Your Acer AV15-51 laptop I believe is an Intel based PC.  It is likely a 10th GEN CPU or higher and as such is using the Intel RST storage driver and is known a Intel VMD driver.  Looking at the Acer downloads support page for your PC shows the storage driver as version 18.6.1.1016.

Looking this driver up on Intel support site indicates that the driver is for the Intel NUC family of devices.  This is not unusual for laptop devices as the NUC drivers are OEM customizable to a large degree.  Intel recommends using only drivers supplied via the OEM channel on such devices as a result of these facts.

Your inability to have the NVMe drive detected properly via the bootable media is not surprising as the bootable media lacks the necessary Intel VMD drivers for the VMD storage controller in the PC.  Your workaround is to inject or add these drivers into the bootable media during the media creation process.

It will be necessary to use WinPE/RE media to have the ability to add these drivers to the media during the creation process.  DO NOT use Rufus or any other boot media builder as all will fail in adding the drivers properly.

I am providing a link to a how-to article about adding device drivers to Acronis boot media which you will find HERE

Once you locate the drivers, use the Acronis Media Creation tool to create a Simple method WinRE media.  During the creation process you will be presented with the opportunity to add device drivers.  At that stage point the tool to the location of the VMD storage drivers.  Once that is completed just follow the remaining steps of the Media Creation wizard.  When you are given the option of what type of media to create, attach a blank USB thumb drive of 32GB or smaller and select it for the target media device.

Once the media is created, boot the USB flash media and your NVMe disk should be available.

Thanks.

It is interesting that the Macrium 8 recovery USB drive, (created on the same PC as the Acronis PE and Rufus recovery USB (Acer Spin 5 10th gen laptop)), worked and found the internal drive but the Acronis did not.

Some Intel drivers were added when the PE was created.  Is it possible to tell which drivers were added to the Acronis PE?

The Acer Vero A15 machine in question has an 11th gen i7.1197G7

As a follow up I went to the Acer site and dumped all the drivers that PC uses to the same machine I have Cyber Home installed on. I force loaded all the infs I could find that referenced storage. It did find the NVME when I booted from the USB drive. Thanks - it worked.

I would think that that Intel driver would be part of the Acronis package as many machines use it.

It is also interesting that I have a generic NUC with the same intel drivers and the Acronis Rufus USB drive worked to boot it up and create an image before first boot. I don't have the exact version because as soon as I backed up the initial load I put Fedora 38 on it and turned it into a Plex server. The Rufus Cyber Home USB does back up the Fedora drive as I set everything to ext4.

Now when I install the Cyber Home on the Acer A15, will it automatically pick up the storage drivers if I create a recovery PE USB drive from it or will I have to manually include them?  Just nice to know going forward.

Anthony,

Glad to hear that you reached success.  At this point in time the Cyber Protect Home Office product will NOT automatically add storage drivers to a USB PE build.  Having said that if and only if you have latest PE ADK installed on your computer and then build PE media the necessary drivers will likely be included.  This is because Intel has ported to MS an OEM.inf version of the drivers for that ADK that support the VMD drivers.

Having said that, because your machine is an OEM product at some point Win RE will contain the drivers as well.  This will likely not occur until the next major version upgrade of Windows 11 roles out and you would have to apply that update to the PC.

You would likely benefit from downloading the Acronis MVP Assistant tool found Here  and then use the Rescue Media feature of that tool to build media.  This tool includes a device driver discovery tool (Driver Analyzer) that will allow you to locate device drivers in any WIM file so all you need is a WIM image file to use as a source and then run the Driver Analyzer feature in the Rescue Builder feature of the MVP Assistant utility tool.

Anthony, the rescue media builder in the MVP Assistant may be able to give you a better picture of what is going on. If you create a project and use an image (.wim) from the Acronis builder, based on WinRE, you could run the driver analysis to see what drivers are in the image as well as the oem drivers used in your running system. If the driver you need is not in the image, it may be listed as a suggested driver to install.

I advise reading through the Help for the MVP Assistant media builder to understand how it does things. If you go to this and need further help, just ask.

Indeed.  Bruno is correct and we are always willing to help if needed.