Installing windows 7 in Laptops having only usb3.0

How to install windows 7 in laptops having only USB 3.0?

Windows 7 RTM distribution doesn’t support USB 3.0, and you can face some problems with the installation of Windows 7 on a computer/laptop having USB 3.0 ports only (This is the situation with majority of new devices.) For instance, USB keyboard and mouse may not work in Windows 7 Setup, or the installer may require to load drivers for your CD/DVD drive and it will show the following error.

A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now.
Note: If the Windows installation media is in the CD/DVD drive, you can safely remove it for this step.

In some laptop models we can rectify this issue by disabling he usb3.0 in bios and activating usb2.0 legacy mode, but for those laptops which doesn’t support this option we have to incorporate the usb3 driver to the boot and install (boot.wim & install.wim) image of the OS.

In order to start the process we need usb3.0 driver, which have to be downloaded from the manufacturer website. Here am downloading the driver from the dell website. Create a folder in a drive which is having space to copy the boot and install images like C:\support , add two more folders inside it like mount and usb. Extract all the downloaded usb drivers to the usb folder.

After all this create a usb bootable windows image. You can use either Rufus or windows usb creator tool for this. Copy the boot.wim and install.wim files from the sources folder in the usb to the win folder that we have created before.

COPY

sources\boot.wim     -----------à   C:\support\win

sources\install.wim   -----------à   C:\support\win

Now we have to integrate the driver to the install and boot packages, Open elevated CMD and mount the install image using DSIM and integrate usb3.0 to it. Please try the below commands for mounting the boot.wim image.

 dism /mount-wim /wimfile:c:\support\boot.wim /index:2 /mountdir:c:\support\mount

dism /image:c:\support\mount /add-driver:"c:\support\usb" /recurse

Below message shows that the driver has been successfully added to the image:

Installing 1 of 6 — c:\support\usb\Drivers\HCSwitch\x64\iusb3hcs.inf: The driver package was successfully installed.

Save the changes in the image and unmount it by using the following command

dism /unmount-wim /mountdir:c:\support\mount /commit

In the same way update the system image in install.wim. The main difference is that install.wim can contain several Windows 7 editions with different indexes. So you will have to integrate drivers to that Windows edition(s) you are going to install.

The list of available system edition can be obtained as follows:

run the command in cmd

dism /Get-WimInfo /WimFile:c:\support\install.wim

In the above image we can see 5 editions in the image. We’ll add the USB 3.0 driver to Windows 7 PROFESSIONAL with the index 4 (this number will be used to address the edition using DISM).

Then add the drivers to the system image like we did it above:

dism /mount-wim /wimfile:c:\support\install.wim /index:4 /mountdir:c:\support\mount

dism /image:c:\support\mount /add-driver:"c:\support\usb" /recurse

dism /unmount-wim /mountdir:c:\support\mount /commit

After installing the driver in install.wim unmount the install.wim file and copy both install.wim and boot.wim files to the USB stick. 

Boot from the usb drive and we can install windows without any error.

Method 2

Download and Install windows 7 USB 3.0 creator from Intel website (Click Here) and follow the instructions in the readme file.

Please comment incase you have any query.