After loading Windows 7 on a new drive on a HP Envy m7-n109dx it won't recognize usb ports

[Addyonthemove]

 Hi,

 I have a problem on my HP M7-U109DX. I bought it last week and I upgraded the installed WIN10 Home to WIN10 Pro 64. So far all is working very well!

For my work I use many programs that slow down the machine or requier WIN7 Pro. My plan was to instal WIN7 Pro 64 as a virtual machine, using Oracle. So I bought a new licence for WIN7 and installed it as a virtual machine. Only one problem, WIN7 does not have the drivers for USB3. After a long search I found a post in this forum about this problem with the same machine but with only running WIN 7, In this post it was adviced to download a driver from Intel and install this driver.  This worked for the person who wrote the first post so I downloaded this driver from Intel

When I try to install this driver, the systems comes with an error; " This computer does not meet the minimum requirements for installing the software"

I checked the requirements in the readme file and my (virtual) machine does meet the requirements. In the WIN7 system setup I can see that the correct proccessor is there and it has 4Gig Memory. I also have more than enough free space on my (virtual) hard disk.

I have disabled the virus scanner on the virtual machine.  I also tried to run the .exe as administrator.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance,

Addy

[banhien]

 >>> This computer does not meet the minimum requirements for installing the software"

@Addyonthemove

That is true, have you read

       https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/02/windows_intel_kaby_lake_amd_zen/

       https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/16/10780876/microsoft-windows-support-policy-new-processors-skylake

Regards.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi, @Addyonthemove ;

Unfortunately, Intel and Microsoft are not supporting any platforms with the Kaby Lake chipsets and 7th gen core processors for any other operating system but W10, as was posted above.

I have helped a few forum members get W7 to work on those machines by modifiying graphics drivers and such, but now apparently Microsoft and Intel are introducing updates to block the installation of drivers that used to work on W7.

The only suggestion I can offer would be this...

Download and unzip this file to its folder.   Do not do anything with the files in the folder.

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/22824/Intel-USB-3-0-eXtensible-Host-Controller-Driver-for-...

Go to the device manager, and click on the USB controller needing the driver.

Click on the driver tab.  Click on Update Driver.

Select the Browse my computer for driver software, and browse to the driver folder you unzipped.

Make sure the Include Subfolders box is checked, and see if the driver installs that way.

That method will bypass the program that checks the hardware/OS for compatibility.

If that doesn't work, there is one other way to try, but try the above approach first.

[Addyonthemove]

Hello Paul,

thank you for the tip again, the last time you helped me was in 2014 when I was installing WIN7 on my previous HP. That machine is still running fine and it has traveled all over the world. So it has deserved a quiet retirement in my office in Portugal.

I had already tried what you wrote above and windows tells me that it cannot find any drivers in the selected folders. So I guess the only thing left to do is creating a WIN7 install image with the drivers mounted to this image... I was hoping to avoid this because this is a lot of work again...

The thing I still don't understand is that I read before that the driver worked for another person with the same laptop as mine. 

Thanks in advance,

Addy

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

You're very welcome, Addy.

OK, then one last thing you can try...

Repeat the steps I posted, but when you get to the Browse my computer for driver software, this time at the bottom of that window, select the Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer.

Click on Have Disk and browse to the unzipped USB driver folder>Drivers>Win7>x64, select the iusb3xhc setup information file and see if the driver installs that way.

[Addyonthemove]

Hi Paul,

It did not work... However I also found some other problems. These were Virtualbox related. So I removed my virtual machine and uninstalled Virtualbox. After a restart I reinstalled Virtualbox, the latest release, and I installed the Virtualbox extencion pack, this time I did this before I tried to create a new virtual machine.

I created my virtual machine and I switched off the automatic windows update option. This just because I did not want to loose hours updating again before I was sure that all drivers were working.

After this I activated the USB3 option in Virtualbox and then started the process of finding the correct driver in WIN7. I started with the download an the normal install using setup.exe in the intel driver download. This did not work. Windows could also not find any drivers in the downloaded and extracted folders... I was starting to pull my hairs out...

Then I tried your last advice again... YES!!! on this new install it worked!!!

So, a long story short.

On this machine "HP Envy m7-n109dx running on WIN 10 Pro (64bit) with WIN 7 Pro running under Oracle Virtualbox V5.1.26 the way to get the USB3 working in WIN 7 is as follows.

Make sure you have Virtualbox V5.1.26 installed and install the Virtualbox expencion pack V5.1.26.

Create a new virtual machine and install WIN7 from a disk, or directly from an ISO file.

Open the virtual machine and click Devices at the top of the running virtual machine, select "Insert Guest Additions CD Image" and run this before you try to update or install the USB 3 drivers.

Download:  https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/22824/USB-3-0-Driver-Intel-USB-3-0-eXtensible-Host-Control...

Unzip and follow the steps Paul sugested in his last reply. The first time you do this one driver will be installed but you will still see an unrecognised driver. Repeat the steps and now the second device will show in your list.

I used the V3.0 drivers.

Paul_Tikkanen, thank you very much for your advices and I hope this post will be helpfull for others.

PROBLEM SOLVED!

Cheers,

Addy

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Anytime.

Glad to have been of assistance, and thanks for the detailed explanation on how to get W7 to work in VirtualBox.