Monday, February 27, 2012

Solve driver missing issue when installing Windows 7 (sp1) from USB drive

There are a lot of tutorials teaching you how to create a bootable USB drive (HDD? key...) that can be use to boot a PC and install Windows 7 on it.
I followed the ones that explains how to partition/format your USB drive (using diskpart) and theb extract the files out off the Windows 7 .ISO file.
Everything seemed to work OK: the PC was booting off the USB drive (a portable WD 500GB USB 3.0 drive) and Windows installation program was launched.
But quite soon in the installation process, the program was complaining about some missing CD/DVD driver.
I tried several "tricks", browsing X:\Windows\inf folder etc.
Did not work.
What worked was
- To unplug and plug again the USB drive
- To press the "Browse" button (like if I was trying to search for the appropriate driver)
- To make sure the USB drive then showed up in the dialog
- To cancel the search of the appropriate driver
- To press the "Install Windows" button again.

When the computer reboots the first time after having copied the first set of installation files on the internal storage (HDD for instance), don't forget to make it boot off the internal storage, and not off the USB-drive.

I did not find this trick when I searched for it, so I create this simple/little blog entry hoping it will help some readers in the future

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