We were unable to detect any disks that can be utilized for a cloud restore

Hi Folks,

The Background

I have a Dell XPS 9305 laptop. I typically switch between linux and windows from time to time. And typically i install windows by using the Microsoft provided windows ISO on their website. But that is tedious because i have to manually download Intel RST drivers and make the windows setup detect them during install.

I do know that we can get the Dell OS image with the help of Dell OS Recovery tool. But one of the problems that we facw with this method is - every time we create a bootale usb stick using Dell OS recovery, and we boot with it, while trying to install the OS, we get the error message - "We were unable to detect any disks that can be utilized for a cloud restore". I have found a way around this issue.

The workaround:

I simply go to BIOS settings and under storage, I change the Storage Device controller from 'RAID On' to 'AHCI/NVMe'. After this i again boot from the bootable usb stick and try to install windows. And this time, the setup is able to detect the storage device. The rest of the setup then works normally.

Caution:

Once you change the storage controller in BIOS and install windows, going forward if you want to change it back to 'RAID On', you wont be able to boot into your OS and you will be stuck with 'AHCI/NVMe'.

Here is a good article comparing the two options. The short version is - with AHCI/NVMe for most personal laptop users there isn't any downside.

https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/Pros-Cons-AHCI-vs-Raid-On-XPS13-9300-NVMe/td-p/7636984

Hope this helped you!!

Btw AHCI/NVMe mode gives me noticably better battery life on Linux ( "I use Arch btw" :p)