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

[ashcanpete]

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).

 

[TheELF]

The chipset is not being recognized,go into device manager ->system devices and delete everything and then do a scan for hardware changes so that windows might recognize the correct devices.

Some mobos also have tools in the bios that allow you to download and install drivers so look into that as well.

 

[LTC8K6]

I usually just use the CD that comes with the board to load drivers that work, and then update the drivers after everything is working.

 

[TheELF]

Yeah but he would have to buy an optical drive...
Only other option is if he has an old hdd lying around.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Uhm, OP, if you've been paying attention since the Z170 / SKL platform launch, you would have known that the chipset ONLY has xHCI (for USB 3.0 and 2.0) controllers, and not EHCI (USB 2.0). Which means that the standard Win7 USB drivers will NOT work, you need to load USB 3.0 xHCI drivers for the board. Which, if the USB ports don't work, could be hard to do.

Doubly-so if the ethernet doesn't work.

So my suggestion, if you have another PC or laptop, is to download a modern Linux distro live ISO, and write it to a USB flash drive using Rufus (on Windows).

Then, boot your new SKL PC using the USB flash drive. It should have Firefox pre-installed on the Linux distro. Change the options in Firefox, to allow choosing where to download files, then browse to the mobo mfg's web site for that board, and download the ethernet and USB 3.0 drivers for Windows 7. Save them to your Windows drive somewhere you will remember them.

When they are done, reboot the PC, pull the Linux flash drive, and boot into Windows. Navigate to where the drivers are, and install them. Voila, your PC is operational again!

 

[vailr]

USB 2.0 ports do function on Skylake boards + Windows 7 when booted in F8 Safe Mode with Networking. However, the Killer LAN port driver of the Gigabyte Gaming 3 board isn't natively supported by Windows, so you'll need to do something like what V. Larry suggested to at least get the LAN port driver installed.
Alternative: temporarily install a Realtek PCIe LAN card, which is natively supported by Windows 7. A TP-Link brand of Realtek Gb LAN card can be found at Amazon or eBay for under $12.