If you bought a laptop recently, it will come with nice, fast USB ports, called USB 3.0. Those are wonderful because they allow to transfer files to and from thumb drives and external hard drives fast. Installation USB thumb drives will also run faster.
Now say you love your new laptop but hate Windows 10 or 8. You have an installation USB drive for Windows 7. When you run the installation, you get the friendly "install now" button, but when you run the installation, you get the error message "A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing".
The issue is that Windows 7 installation files do not include drivers for USB 3.0. Transitional laptops used to have an option in the BIOS for momentarily disabling USB 3.0 and reverting to USB 2.0. The newest laptops do not. What to do?
Here is the tip I got from Dell tech support. There is an Intel utility that modifies Windows installation images to make them able to run on USB 3.0 ports. It is not terribly difficult to use. You will need a computer running Windows and the installation thumb drive you want to modify. Insert the installation thumb drive in a port on that computer.
1) Go to https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/25476/Windows-7-USB-3-0-Creator-Utility and download the zip file.
2) Right click on the downloaded file and select "extract" (or try double clicking it). This will extract 3 files to a folder. You need to run the executable as an administrator. Right-click on Installer_Creator(.exe) and select "run as administrator" in the pull down menu.
3) Click on the button with the ... on the right of the USB path box.
4) Expand My Computer by clicking the little arrow than click on the mount point corresponding to the USB drive
5) Click on "Create Image" and wait for it to finish. It tells you what it is doing in cryptic language and each step takes a long time, so give it time (something like 15 minutes overall).
When it is done, the installation thumb drive has been patched and is ready to use on a USB 3.0 port.
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