After the failure of my 10-year-old P4 system, I was recently motivated to purchase an HP Envy 15 1100 custom laptop. Normally, this wouldn’t be a noteworthy occasion; however, it turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. Luckally, I found solutions.
I desired a clean install, free of all of the junk and partitioning that comes with a commercial PC. Hewlett-Packard made two bold moves with the new Envy’s:
- It has a USB 3.0 Host Controller
- It’s using a cutting-edge ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5830
A clean install of Windows 7 Professional 64bit yielded a very cryptic error message: “Required cd/dvd drive device driver is missing”. The Envy has no internal optical drives, but came with an external USB drive. After a few days of pulling my hair out, it turns out that the bootstrap OS for Windows 7 did not have drivers for the USB 3.0 Host Controller. The BIOS did; and thus, after the bootstrapper loaded the OS into memory, the computer no longer knew how to use anything attached to USB. After a lot of hunting, I finally found the drivers and I was able to install Windows 7 successfully.
This was not the end of my headaches; the video card would also provide many hours of frustration. As it turns out, the Mobility Radeon HD 5830 is so new that not even ATI has released WHQL-certified drivers. I contacted HP support, but they referred me to a driver download to the Mobility Radeon HD 4830. That simply did not work.
In a desperate attempt, I put the official HP recovery discs into my external DVD drive in hopes that I could undo what I did. No such luck. They didn’t support the USB 3.0 Host Controller, nor did it give you an opportunity to load them. This was made all-the-more frustrating by the fact that HP charged me to have the recovery discs in the first place.
It took many hours of google searches and forum reading to find all of these solutions. So, dear readers, I will save you a weekend of frustration.
NEC USB 3.0 Driver – Windows 7 driver for the USB 3.0 Host ControllerMobility Radeon HD 5830 WHQL Driver – courtesy of www.strags.com- Latest drivers: HP ENVY 15 (INTEL) – a frequently updated list of HP Envy drivers
I hope that someone will find this helpful.
Update
HP has officially released both the Radeon and USB 3 drivers. Both can be found on the Latest Drivers link above or on the HP support website.
Update II
It seems as though the installation package for the USB 3 Host Controller is lacking the inf files necessary for installing Windows 7. I’ve made a package for the x86 and 64bit versions of the drivers; you can download them here: NEC USB 3.0 Drivers***.
*** – I offer no warranty and hold no liability regarding the validity of these files; though, they were extracted from a legitimate package. If you are in doubt, please do not download them.
Hi, about the Envy nightmare.
I Also got stuck with this problem, but didn´t succed.
What did you do with the drivers?
Did you repack the windows installation you used with the new drivers?
The link to the driver is broken also.
I am trying to install windows 7 on a ned faster Harddrive.
Thank´s for you blog post by the way.
The way I had to do it was to extract the drivers from the installation package and place them on an SD Card. The one that comes with the Envy has sufficient space to fit them. When it prompts you for the “Required cd/dvd drive device driver”, click Have Disk and browse to your SD Card (which should be recognized by the Windows 7 installer).
Of course, if you’re using the HP recovery DVD’s, you’re not given the opportunity to load any drivers. I’m still fighting with HP over that issue. At the very worst, you may have to find a friend with a retail Windows 7 DVD of the same version that you purchased (Home/Pro).
Also, HP has released the official drivers for the USB 3.0 Host Controller and I’ve updated the post to reflect that.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Thanks for the answer.
I actually tried that before with the drivers found on HPs´ page, but with no luck,
it seems like the drivers are not correct, it just prompts me to point them out.
Still scratching my head..
Let me be a little more precise, i point out the directory out with the .inf files from the drivers, and it just re prompts me to point them out again.
I am trying to install home premium, the same that I got with the computer.
Thanks again.
I solved it in a different way!
My thing was that i wanted to install a fresh unbloated version of windows on ma faster Intel SSD.
So heres how i did it.
1. With the original hard drive in the computer create HP-rescue discs
2. Put the new hard drive in the computer
3. From the windows instal DVD, move all the files to A SD-card (3gb required)
4. boot with the rescue disc
5. start a commandprompt
6. Navigate to the directory on the SD card where you put the windows install files
7. run setup.exe, Done!
And of course after the win installation, get all drivers from HPs´ site to get your computer working correctly.
Took me 16hours of fiddling to figure this out, hope to save someone a couple of hours with this post!
/Robert
Hi Jeremy, Thanks for the guide. It almost works but the USB 3 driver from HPs website doesn’t contain an .inf file. Could you share the file with me?
Help is much appreciated!
best regards
Nikolaj
I’ve extracted the inf files for both x86 and 64bit from the original package that I’d downloaded. You can get them here: USB3 Drivers
I have the problem too with the missing of drivers, and I tried downloading the drivers you linked to Jeremy, but when I navigate to them and it scans after the needed drivers, it says something like “no drivers was found”. and I really don’t know what to do. :/ I want to install my windows 7 Ultimate 64x
Thx alot for the tip on the USB drivers. Made my day.
Thank you very much. With the driver added to the sd card I managed to install the OS, and it works perfectly!!
Thank you for this guide. Saved me an afternoon of digging!
[...] of you may remember The HP Envy 15 Driver Nightmare — some of you may still be dealing with it (albeit, it’s much easier now than when I [...]
Here’s how I did it: Popped the Win 7 install DVD in while Win 7 was running, had it do a new install (which automatically moved the old windows 7 to a folder called windows.old), then deleted that folder. Voila, fresh install.
But there’s another solution, and it’ll probably make you cry. You know that eSATA port you have? It’s a combo USB/eSATA port. USB 2.0.
If you plugged your external USB DVD drive into the eSATA port, it would’ve worked perfectly.
My friend was trying to install Linux on his Envy, and it wouldn’t install because of the USB 3.0 thing, but we discovered that the eSATA/USB combined port is actually USB 2.0, and it worked fine.
Thank you very much for sharing these informations – the USB 3.0 was a lifesaver for me! Keep up the good work
Thank you so much! You are a lifesaver. I was about to tear my eyes out, hehe.
Thanks a ton for this post! You saved my day!
When I faced this issue my first attempt was to slipstream drivers (and, obviously, it would fail because I installed from USB stick), but I didn’t even know what drivers are missing (error message is way too abstract)
Dude,
you save my freakin life with this, please email me with your closest beer drinking establishment and allow me to buy you a beer.
Ben