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:

1. It has a USB 3.0 Host Controller
2. 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 Controller
• Mobility 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.