Disable RAID setting in BIOS when booting from external media
I was trying to restore to new dissimilar hardware using the procedure outlined in "KB69330: Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office: Restoring to dissimilar hardware with Acronis Universal Restore." My system booted properly to Linux from the thumb drive I created using the Acronis Universal Restore Media Builder. The only problem was that none of the internal drives (one solid state, two conventional HDD) were recognized, so I couldn't restore my old partition backup to the C drive.
A text chat with Acronis support didn't help. It was suggested that Linux might not have had the proper drivers, so I should try making a WinRE boot drive from the Rescue Media Builder. I tried that with various configurations, but all of those caused the system to blue screen.
Googling this issue specifically for my computer model, Dell XPS 8950, led me to the solution. Apparently, Dell ships all computers with the RAID setting activated in BIOS, though this makes no sense for computers that ship with just one drive. (I added the two SATA drives to my computer after receiving it.) I disabled RAID and all was good. (The setting on my BIOS version was called SATA/NVME OPERATION, which I changed from RAID ON to AHCI/NVME.)
I was able to restore my partition and then ran Acronis Universal Restore. The system started on the first try and I just had to install a few drivers that had failed installation during Universal Restore, do some updates, and reinstall printers.
So my advice to anyone having trouble starting your system from bootable media is to disable the RAID setting in BIOS if you don't actually have a RAID.
- Tom


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