What to do if Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office does not recognize your SSD

Sometimes Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office may not recognize an SSD.

In such a case, check whether the SSD is recognized in BIOS.

If the BIOS of your computer does not show the SSD, verify that the power and data cables are properly connected. You may also try to update the BIOS and SATA drivers. If these suggestions do not help, contact the Support of your SSD manufacturer.

If the BIOS of your computer does show the SSD

  1. Depending on your operating system, type cmd in the Search field or in the Run field, and then press Enter.

  2. At the command line prompt type, enter:

    diskpart 
    list disk

    The screen will show the disks connected to your computer. Find out the disk number for your SSD. Use its size as the reference.

  3. To select the disk, run the following command:

    select disk N

    Here N is the disk number of your SSD.

  4. To remove all information from the SSD and overwrite the MBR with the default one, run the command:

    clean
    exit
    exit

Start Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office and check whether it detects the SSD. If it detects the SSD, use the Add new disk tool to create a single partition on the disk occupying the entire disk space. When creating a partition, check that the free space before partition is 1 MB. For more information, see Adding a new hard disk.

To check whether your Acronis bootable media recognizes the SSD

  1. Boot from the Acronis bootable media.
  2. Select Tools & Utilities -> Add New Disk in the main menu and the Disk selection screen will show the information about all hard disks in your system. Use this for checking whether the SSD is detected in the recovery environment.
  3. If the screen shows your SSD, just click Cancel.

If the bootable media does not recognize the SSD and the SSD controller mode is AHCI, you can try to change the mode to IDE (or ATA in some BIOS brands) and see whether this solves the problem.

Attention! Do not start Windows after changing the mode; it may result in serious system problems. You must return the mode to AHCI before starting Windows.

If after changing the mode the bootable media detects the SSD, you may use the following procedure for recovery or cloning under bootable media:

  1. Shut down the computer.
  2. Boot to BIOS, change the mode from AHCI to IDE (or ATA in some BIOS brands).
  3. Boot from Acronis bootable media.
  4. Recover or clone the disk.
  5. Boot to BIOS and change IDE back to AHCI.
  6. Start Windows.

What to do if the above suggestions do not help

You can try to create a WinPE-based media. This may provide the necessary drivers. For more information, see Creating Acronis bootable media.