Win7: loading USB3 driver to offline Windows image fails

Question

[edit, and subject change, since the previous version didn't get any interest]

See here for the procedure to load a driver to an offline Win7 image using dism. It's pretty simple, but I can't get it to work for loading USB3 drivers (to allow Win7 to use a new motherboard which has only USB3 ports, and no USB2 ports). I know that dism successfully loaded the new drivers to the old image, but the new drivers are not used during boot of the old image.

I suspect that the reason is that the new driver is somehow only activated after a user login, but I've got no idea. Of course, since there are no USB2 ports on this computer, the user doesn't have a keyboard or mouse to log in with, so the new driver is never used.

Background: I need to change a motherboard, but use the old HDD (with the original Win7 loaded on it). The new BIOS has no options to drop down to USB2.

Here's what I've done so far:

1. Made a bootable USB drive from the original Win7 DVD, with the USB3 drivers from the Intel site (using dismgui). This works as expected, and I can use it for Win7 installation and recovery on my new USB3 mobo. It's no use, though, since I want to use the old Win7 HDD

2. Ran 'load drivers' from the new recovery USB drive, to try to get the USB3 drivers onto my original drive. It does try to load the (3) drivers, but says that the load failed

3. So, I instead opened a command prompt from the new recovery USB drive, and ran dism manually:

   dism /Image:D:\ /Add-Driver /Driver:E:\usb3\Drivers /Recurse

this appeared to work, with all the drivers being loaded. However, when I boot the old drive, the keyboard and mouse are still dead, so it didn't work.

I know that dism has put the new drivers in the right place: 3 drivers in windows\system32\drivers, and the same ones in \windows\system32\DriverStore. This is exactly where they are located in my installation image on the USB stick.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong here? How do I get the new drivers to 'activate'?

Answer 1

Firstly, make sure the keyboard and mouse are working fine. And checking if the usb 3.0 port is dead.

Seems that you have already install the drivers, have you tried to go to Device Manager to check if there is any warnings on the device. If so, right click the device and choose to update the driver. Despite the USB3.0 driver that you should installed, you need to also install mouse and keyboard driver.

In addition, make your system is up to date, install all the updates.

Answer 2

It's not great, but this works, if your old motherboard is still usable.

Put the drive back in the old system, and buy and plug in a USB3 card (the cheapest you can find). Load the drivers from the card's installation disk, make sure it works.

now put the card on your new motherboard, and plug the keyboard and mouse into that card. This will get you beyond the login, but it's possible that not much else will work. I had to put in an Ethernet card from the old system, and the old graphics card. I also ran Intel's tool to load drivers for the C236 chipset, but it didn't seem to help. After a few restarts it's all working as before.

MS Office wanted to go online to re-activate. It did this in a couple of seconds, automatically, with no prompting. I re-activated Windows from the control panel - again, a couple of seconds, no problem. So, it's possible, but a hassle.