Hi All,
I’ve just rebuilt a (broken) PC with ‘new’ (but old stock) motherboard and HD. I thought I’d ‘upgrade’ to windows 7 at the same time…

All was fine, until just after the MS licence agreement bit, when up pops the message “no drivers were found”. The ‘load driver’ facility just asks for the installation media, so in goes the installation disk that came with the motherboard. This just comes up as “No signed device drivers were found”. I’ve also tried downloading drivers from the web (using another computer) and transferring them on a memory stick, but still no joy.

My questions are these: are there some (older) motherboards which just won’t run windows 7? Might Vista or XP work, where 7 won’t? (I always thought the HD drivers came ‘built in’ with motherboards.

Cheers

Post the specs of your computer please

mainly motherboard, chip, ram, additional devices that cant find drivers

and what win7 disk are you using 64bit or 32bit and are you doing it as an upgrade of fresh install / format?

is your installation of windows 7 hooky?
if it is – the ones i’ve used can only be loaded from a bootable usb stick.

I dont think thats the problem HTTP404

Firstly you need to check that the motherboard has Win7 drivers available for it. The manufacturers site should be able to tell you.

Once you have downloaded drivers for the correct Win7 version, you need to make sure that they are saved on a medium that can be used during the installation.

Does the motherboard have the ability to boot from USB drives? If not then you’ll probably not be able to use the USB drive for loading the drivers. You could try burning the drivers onto a CD and using that.

The other option is to create a Win7 install disc from the one you have that has all the required drivers already in place. This is called ‘Slipstreaming’ and there is some pretty simple software available off t’interweb for doing this. It works well as I used this method for installing XP on a new Dell laptop a few weeks ago.

Specs as follows:
MB: XFX Geforce 9300
Ram: 4GB
Chip: Intel Core 2 Quad(Q8300)
HD: Hitachi ‘Deskstar’ 250GB

The windows 7 I’m trying to use is legit and has options of loading either 64 or 32bit (have tried both – same result).
It’s a fresh install, but I assumed that Windows would automatically format the HD etc.

Funkynick, thank you.
I’ll try what you suggest.

Try disabling AHCI in BIOS, or enabling IDE compatibility mode (same thing, different wording).

Are you trying to install W7 x32 or x64?

What’s the motherboard make and model?

Extract this to a USB stick / CD, and try it under your ‘load driver’ option maybe?

http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/win7-winvista-32bit-266.58-whql-driver-uk.html

The manufacturers site should be able to tell you.

I had a quick look, you need to create a login and give them a serial number to access their site. Good advice tho.

Hi All,

Thank you for all the advice – I’ve now got a few leads to follow and hopefully will have the thing running soon…

If you go the slipstream route, the software I used was vLite. It was very easy to use…

Sounds like W7 can’t find the sata ports.

Check the motherboard BIOS does NOT have SATA RAID enabled.

If anything, reset the BIOS to the defaults.

Yeah, I was going to suggest the same as cougar. Nothing more to add other than that apart from expressing some sympathy. As someone who has also had a few days of messing with computers that need something fixing before the other thing that needs fixing in a self perpetuating continuous mind**** – I’m beginning to feel a bit tense. Another fellow of the brotherhood of frustration. Jumped up calculators.