New Gigabyte motherboard, can't load drivers, USB sticks not recognized in windows

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AshcanPete

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Oct 8, 2009
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I just bought and installed a new Gigabyte Gaming 3 with a i5-6600K. I was coming from an AMD board/CPU so I did a sysprep in my Windows 7 install to clear out drivers right before installing the board. Windows 7 booted right up without needing a fresh install (thank goodness). A couple drivers auto-installed, but not the ethernet adapter, so I can't download the drivers (I have no optical drive).

I tried downloading drivers on my laptop to 2 different USB sticks, but they aren't recognized at all by any of the USB ports on my new mobo. I should note that my mouse and keyboard are USB and they work fine. Anyway, with no ethernet driver, no optical drive and no USB sticks being recognized, does anyone know how I can now install any drivers?

Also, I now feel pretty dumb for not downloading all the drivers to my hard drive before installing the new mobo, but at this point its too late (at least not without hours of hardware reassembly and doing a restore of my backup from before the sysprep).
 
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I don't have much experience with any PE bootables and there isn't much documentation for most. I can recommend 3DP Net for your Ethernet driver which may help with the USB connections. It automatically detects your net card and installs a generic driver to get an Internet connection.

Are you able to boot into the recovery options? You may be able to access the command prompt from that menu and as long as there isn't a hardware issue, the mobo should be able to detect any USB device attached.

http://blogs.which.co.uk/technology/files/2012/11/System-Recovery-Options.jpg

I believe you tap F8 to get there. Then you could use the copy commands to get what you need.
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AshcanPete

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Yeah, I think that would work, I also thought of buying a SATA optical drive. I was really hoping to avoid ordering anything if anyone knows of a simpler solution, but if not that would definitely be easier than taking everything apart and reassembling.
 
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wildfire707

wildfire707

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Simpler is a matter of definition. If you have the time, you can download Ubuntu linux to your laptop and build a bootable USB flash drive by following instructions online.

Then you boot the USB drive (with your BIOS set to boot USB first) and mount the hard drive partition. If your hard drive is not encrypted, it should work. Then you can download drivers and save them to a folder on the hard drive. The last time I tried this, the drive was mounted as read only until I followed more directions that I looked up.

Note: this can be very time consuming. The last time that I did this was about 3 years ago and it took about 4 hours. I think that I would just get a SATA DVD drive myself if I had to do it over again :)

Good luck!
 
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AshcanPete

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Oct 8, 2009
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That's pretty clever, I didn't think of that. I actually have a bootable copy of ubuntu sitting right here, unfortunately its on a DVD! Anyway, I think you're right in that it would ultimately take more time, especially if I run into read only issues. I wonder what's the smallest bootable OS (linux or anything else) that can read and write to a windows partition?

Also, when you did this, did you have a second USB stick with the drivers that you also had to mount once loaded into Ubuntu? Cause I'm not sure that Ubuntu will do any better than Windows 7 with reading a USB stick on this motherboard.

 
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greeneman42

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Maybe you could try something like BartPE. It should allow you to create a bootable environment that will give you access to the HDD and allow you to copy over whatever files/ drivers needed.

Also you could place whatever files needed on your laptop's HDD and then install that in your desktop.

Edit: Ultimate Boot CD is another option also to be able to copy/move files outside of windows
 
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AshcanPete

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Oct 8, 2009
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BartPE sounds like exactly what I'm looking for. Unfortunately, according to their homepage, it doesn't seem to exist anymore! I will try Ultimate Boot CD, it looks like the included Parted Magic might do the trick. A quick google search shows maybe WindowsPE is another alternative, but it looks like it might be time consuming to get going. Can you recommend any other similar options?
 
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greeneman42

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Mar 17, 2016
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I don't have much experience with any PE bootables and there isn't much documentation for most. I can recommend 3DP Net for your Ethernet driver which may help with the USB connections. It automatically detects your net card and installs a generic driver to get an Internet connection.

Are you able to boot into the recovery options? You may be able to access the command prompt from that menu and as long as there isn't a hardware issue, the mobo should be able to detect any USB device attached.

http://blogs.which.co.uk/technology/files/2012/11/System-Recovery-Options.jpg

I believe you tap F8 to get there. Then you could use the copy commands to get what you need.
 
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