Alienware PC issue: SD4 LAN

Peter,

If the system is physically available to you, you can use the offline recovery media to boot directly from it on the Alienware.  From there, you could run image creator to capture the image "locally" and then save it to an external drive and/or transfer it to the server.

I suspect that SD4 doesn't have the necessary drivers for your system as SD4 is a few years old now

Acronis Snap Deploy 4.0 (Build # 540, English, 358.0 MB)2012-10-26

and the default media probably doesnt' have all fo the necessary drivers.  In order to get it to see the server, you'd likely have to build a WinPE boot.wim and upload that to the server.  The WinPE.wim would need the necessary NIC drivers for the Alienware, but I believe that SD4 only supported WinPE 4.0 (Windows 7) and not 5.0 (Windows 8/8.1) or 6.0 (Windows 10)

In some cases, using the default linux media (locally on the machine) I've had good luck using a USB to ethernet adapter if the NIC won't be detected either.  With PXE boot, teh adapters can be hit or miss, but when booting the localy machine, it usually can create an image and store it on a network share just fine (assuming you have the permissions on the share accessible and can provide the correct network name and password to authenticate manually when prompted from the rescue media).

So I can boot into Acronis over an Ethernet cable just fine; however, I can't create an image on the server because the server itself doesn't show up upon starting the image creator.

Peter, 

Try typing in the path in the search bar to the share.

Example:\\

192.168.1.100\acronisimages    <enter>

You should get an authentication request to be able to get to it like that. In an AD network, don't forfeit to use domain\username for the username.