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SSD not visible

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I just purchased a Lenovo laptop and wanted to do a base backup before I started uninstalling crapware, etc. I am using the Acronis recover bootable USB made from my WIn10 machine using Acronis 2016 and the WinPE option.

When I boot from the USB to the laptop, the SSD is not visible. It is a WD NVMe SDD. I have searched for a solution, but haven't found any that work as yet. Is someone able to advise? Thanks.

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When you are booting the recovery media, are you selecting to boot from the recovery media in UEIF mode rather than legacy mode? If not try again using UEFI.

The basic drivers for NVMe drives are included in Windows 10, so hopefully they are included in your recovery media.

Ian

I'm booting using F12 to give me a boot menu. There are only two options:

Windows Boot Manager (WDC PC SN530 SDBMPZ-512G-1101)

EFI USB Device (Generic Flash Disk)

 

No options for legacy / UEFI and I can't see any in the BIOS menus.

Glen, seeing Windows Boot Manager  shows the laptop uses UEFI BIOS boot mode, so you would need to use the EFI USB Device option to boot the Acronis rescue media.

The core issue here is probably that your Win 10 PC used to create the ATI 2016 WinPE rescue media does not have any NVMe SSD devices and the media doesn't include device driver support for the same, so you would need to inject these during the build process for the media.

Typically you may need to inject the Intel RST drivers to support both NVMe and RAID devices (which many SSD's use for performance reasons even with only a single drive).

If you still have issues, then download the MVP Custom PE Builder tool from the Community tools KB page (see below) and use this with the option to add Custom drivers which includes Intel RST.

After much Googling, I found a solution. It seems WinPE has an issue with RAID in the BIOS and Secure Boot. The laptop is set up with Intel VMD enabled and secure boot, so after disabling secure boot and Intel VMD to set the drive back to AHCI, it appeared in WinPE.

I still had to turn off bitlocker as Acronis said it could not back up an encrypted disk. Once done the backup proceed.

All good now. Thanks for you help.

Glen, it should be possible to backup the SSD with both RAID and Intel VMD enabled but you would need to build the Acronis WinPE rescue media and inject all the required RAID & VMD drivers to that media.