Dell Optiplex 3080 not able to see drive for imaging

[Anonymous]

I have an interesting issue. I had been imaging Dell Optiplex 3070 small form factor pc with Rescuezilla no problem. However, I just purchased some Dell 3080s and now I can't seem to see the drive to backup or restore images. I have turned off secure boot and TPM but to no avail. Anyone have an idea what I could be missing on why I'm not able to see the hard drive within Rescuezilla?

[Rescuezilla]

Hi Anonymous,

What version of Rescuezilla are you using? The latest version (currently v2.1.2) based on Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy) tends to have great support booting and detecting hardware for machines containing components that were released prior to around October 2020.

By the way, since you're able to boot, there's definitely no reason to modify your Secure Boot and TPM at all. Those settings should not have any impact on Rescuezilla's ability to "see" the disks.

You may be interested in the recent experience of a Rescuezilla user with a similar issue. His LiteOn NVMe M2 drive was configured through the Dell BIOS in "RAID ON" setting, and after a lot of research and investigation he found that switching to AHCI was required for him to have it detected by Rescuezilla:

Today I found that there is a way to convert from RAID to AHCI without having to re-install Windows 10. The procedure is actually not to difficult and works with my PC. After converting Rescuezilla recognizes the NVMe disk. Hurrah!
Here is the procedure:

1. Run msconfig
2. Enable Safe Boot (minimal)
3. Reboot into BIOS and change SATA setting from RAID to AHCI
4. Boot up (will be into safe mode)
5. Run msconfig again and disable Safe Boot.
6. Reboot

This took me 5 minutes and worked without a flaw,

The root cause of your problem may differ, but let me know how you go!

[Anonymous]

Hi,

For future reference: I had the same problem this weekend with a Dell 7070 micro, on which I wanted to install VMware ESXi. I wanted to make a copy of the Windows installation before starting.

Booting with Rescuezilla 2.1.3 (or the competing product) went well, but RZ did NOT see the SSD in the PC.

The solution was to enable Legacy External Boot in the BIOS. ONLY after selecting to boot with Legacy (after pressing F12) did reveal the drive. Using UEFI with Safeboot OFF did not work (but Rescuezilla DID start and was operational). Both options are available in the bootmenu at the same time.

The problem with the Dell 7070 is that this legacy method is NOT supported on INTERNAL drives; this forced me to install ESX on a USB stick (otherwise ESX did not see the internal drive I just booted from). I did not try the AHCI method, as ESX docs suggested a RAID should be available.

I hoped that the Dell 3070/3080 series would not have this problem, as they are more meant for regular consumers (the 70xx is considered to be the business model), but now I assume this is not the case.

Hope this helps someone someday,

Marcel