It’s a little fussy and fragile: it won’t run on a Win 7 host, wouldn’t work for me in a Win 10 virtual machine, and on a native Win 10 laptop it barfed when the laptop went to sleep during the process (and it’s a long process…). Intel provides a nifty utility that can modify an existing Windows 7 SP1 install setup that’s already on a flash drive and plug in the appropriate drivers. During the following Win 7 install browse to that folder to access the drivers. Use a live Linux flash drive, a temporary install of Windows 8 or 10 (which should be installable via flash drive) or any other means to copy the USB 3.0 drivers (expanded as below) to a directory on the main drive. If Only USB drivers are needed and the main drive doesn’t need NVMe or iRST (RAID) drivers for access by the Win 7 installer, it can be used to hold the required drivers during installation.
This article explores how to add the drivers to the install media so they’re already in place when needed – and the same media can be used for later/other installs as well. It might be possible to stash the drivers on some other medium (if it’s readable somehow) or even on the target main drive. The old-school fix for this is to put the necessary drivers on media and do an “F6” driver add during the install process, but… since we only have USB 3.0 ports we can’t read flash media. At some point the install drive access is handed over to the newly-booted install code, which doesn’t have 3.0 drivers. What happened is that the initial boot was done via BIOS functions. Huh? You’ve already booted from the flash drive, so how can that be? What it means is that the installer is missing the driver it needs to access the flash drive. This can be a little startling, especially if you’re installing from a flash drive. The strange outcome of this is the misleading “ A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing” error. The chipsets don’t support plain-old USB 2.0 sockets. Many, if not all laptops these days are USB 3.0 only. This makes a “clean” install impossible without some work.
OEM images like Lenovo’s preload and recovery media will include appropriate drivers but Microsoft media will not. Lack of USB 3.0 drivers can make the install media unbootable (past the initial boot) and lack of NVMe SSD drivers can render the target drive invisible to the installer.
This has become more of an issue lately with Windows 7 installs and contemporary hardware. It’s the same old story: hardware marches on, and operating systems play catch-up. This is the 4th and final (for now…) in a set of small articles on modification and use of Windows 7 install media: multi-version, UEFI boot, driver injection, and downgrade activation. Those with weak stomachs may want to look away… It may be worse watching install media being modified. You know what they say about watching sausage getting made.
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