The messages are:
"No boot filename received"
"Exiting Intel Boot Agent""
and ,"NO Boot Device Found"

I have Macrium Reflect 8 and have 3 current disk images.

I have Macrium recovery on a USB thumb drive for recovery. The boot order in BIOS is set to USB first, but the Intel boot runs. The same failure occurrs with my Windows 10 recovery thumb drive. The boot-list option is set to legacy, not UEFI.

Prior events:
I started the PC this morning and saw that Macrium was making incremental backups. When I checked several hours later the computer was either off or in boot error mode -- I can't remember which.

Windows updates automatically, so that could have caused this.

What can I do?

More-information-1: This failure happened May 15. On May 14 a message from my antivirus (Kaspersky) offered to increase the computer's startup speed by not loading programs that I don't use. I answered OK.

More-information-2: This failure seems identical to one that happened to me 11/7/2022 on the same computer - a Dell T1700 running Windows 10 pro). The solution at that time by Best Buy Geek Squad was to replace the disk with a larger one, add a new windows 10, download Macrium 8 Free, and load a previous disk image.

More-information-3: During startup of the PC I used to get an option to choose between Windows and Macrium. But now the start sequence doesn't get that far.

More-information-4: I examined the thumb drive containing incremental backups. The last backup was 5/9/23 - corresponding to Microsoft's update change. No increments were created for the past 7 days. Also I tried to start a new image on a new thumb drive, but File Explorer couldn't see the new thumb.

A picture of the startup screen is attached.

The Intel Boot Agent messages are because PXE booting is somewhere in your boot list, so those messages indicate that PXE was attempted and failed -- which is expected if you're not in an environment that has a PXE server. But PXE would only have been tried after options higher in the list had failed. As to why that's occurring, those messages don't offer enough insight into that. But the choice you're referring to between booting to Windows or Reflect Rescue comes from the Windows Boot Manager instance on your internal disk, and even the Reflect Rescue option boots from files on your internal disk. What you need now, and hopefully have, is external Rescue Media on a flash drive or an optical disc. If you have that, then try to boot your PC into Rescue from that, at which point you can see whether it can detect the disk at all (to rule out hardware failure as a possible cause). If it does, then I would start by simply running the Fix Boot Problems wizard in case it's a simple bootloader issue. If that doesn't resolve it, then try restoring from a recent backup since it sounds like you have one.

If you never created external Rescue Media, then if you have some other PC that works where you can install Reflect, even the Free version, you can try creating Rescue Media there. That isn't ideal because "foreign" Rescue Media might lack drivers you need for your system, but that's probably your best bet here. It's always a very good idea to have "external" Rescue Media created from the PC where you would intend to use it, at the very least stored as an ISO file somewhere that you can turn into bootable media on-demand if the need arises (again presuming you'd have another PC to do so.)

I can now start the external recovery media from a USB thumb drive, and can examine the drives in the T17000. The SSD containing Windows is not visible. The recovery media was made 12/22/2023. A second HD is visible and it contains an image made from the hidden SSD.

I am wondering if a wrong BIOS setting could be hiding the SSD, or if it would more likely be a hardware problem?

It’s almost certainly a driver problem. Normally this occurs because a driver is missing, which in this case would be either the Intel Rapid Storage driver or possibly some other RAID controller driver, depending on the system in question. And to that end, in the you can look under the Restore menu and click View Unsupported Devices. If you see a storage controller listed, that’s your issue. But even if you don’t, the Rapid Storage controller is a special case because Intel has annoyingly used the same Device ID across multiple controller generations, which means that sometimes an old driver will appear to be a match and therefore be loaded, but will not actually support that generation of controller..

The other HD is likely he visible because it’s connected in a way that doesn’t have it running through that controller.

The fix is to obtain the appropriate driver for your system and Windows kernel your Rescue Media is using, the latter of which you can see in the Rescue title bar along the very top of the display — and get it into the \Drivers\Disk folder of your Rescue Media. Just create a new folder in there with any name you want, and copy the driver files into it. You can get that driver from the PC vendor’s Support site, and then make sure you copy extracted driver files to your Rescue Media — look for INF and SYS files — not something like an installer EXE.

I downloaded the rapid storage driver "ZipPack External" file,
"IRST_APP_Intel_A11_WIN_R4HDM_SETUP_ZPE.exe"
The instructions for it are:
"This file contains a compressed (or zipped) set of files. Download the file to a folder on your hard drive, and then run (double-click) it to unzip the set of files. Follow the instructions to complete the installation."

In spite of the instructions, running the file doesn't extract, but produces a request for permission to change the current computer. I declined. I will call Dell Support tomorrow to find out how to get the *.INF and/or *.SYS files,

Also, should I create folder Drivers\newDrivers\ for the new file(s)? I don't have a Drivers\Disk\. I have Drivers\Macrium.oem (12/20/22, 0KB)

FYI:
Windows kernel = Windows PE 10 version 1709 (64-bit) [UEFI]
[Restore][View unsupported Devices] = "All devices have drivers loaded"

The Rapid Storage driver package on the Dell Support page for that system is here. Instead of using the ZipPack version, download the EXE for Windows, which provides an "Extract" option to just get driver files out.

If your Rescue Media's "Drivers" folder doesn't have a "Disk" subfolder, you can just create one, and then under that create a new folder with any name you want, such as "IntelRST".

Another option you could try would be to just build Rescue Media using WinPE 11, which will have broader native driver support. There's no requirement that your Rescue Media use the same kernel version as your installed Windows environment.  Although that's admittedly a bit of a long shot here given that the Win10 kernel should have native support already if the latest driver provided by Dell for this system hails from 2014.

I downloaded and extracted the Rapid Storage driver files and put them in Drivers\Disk\IntelRST2\


There are no *.INF or *.SYS files.

I booted the T1700 with the recovery thumb. The result seem to be the seems to be the same as before. The 500 GB drive containing windows is still hidden.

The first window under "Fix Windows boot problems" is empty. The next window contains Macrium USB.

I might have harmed the recovery media 2 days ago when I unknowingly ran the fix on the recovery media. There are two files on the thumb drive now with that date.



Additional information:
1 A current image of the hidden disk is on the 2T disk that can be seen.

2 Last December I had what might be the same problem as this. At that time Geek Squad added a new SSD and Windows and was able to restore the image from thr 2T drive to the new drive using Macrium 8 free.

Reflect won't be able to work with the EXE, so lack of any change in behavior would be expected there. That SetupRST.exe file is a package that would itself contain the drivers (evidently Dell is taking a Russian doll approach here....), but if that EXE doesn't give you a way to extract its contents either, then things will be more difficult. If you haven't already, try opening a Command Prompt window, browsing to that folder that contains SetupRST.exe and entering, "SetupRST.exe -?". That might surface a dialog box that provides arguments you can feed to the EXE, one of which might be a command to extract the contents of the package, even if there's no such capability "advertised" when you run the EXE normally.

On my HP laptop, I ran setupRST.exe from File Explorer and got the message "The version of the product that is already installed is newer than the one you are about to install. ..."