Intel USB 3.0 Creator Utility, Windows 7 and other things in the park

[shaggy77]

Hello!

I recently purchased a NUC6i5 system. Once up and running to my liking, it will be replacing the Skylake i5 system I built earlier this year. Now i would prefer to have Windows 7 running on the NUC at this time. (I like the overall feeling of W7 over 10. ironically this is being typed on a W10 laptop) Here is what I have done so far. Long story short.

Downloaded and ran the USB 3.0 Creator utility for the Windows 7 USB drive I have. I would get to the last image, at which point it would stop working and give a message of the program needs to close. Yes I was running this program on a Windows 10 laptop and with admin privileges. So I figured maybe it was something wrong with the ISO copy on the jump drive.

Next I download a minty fresh copy of the Windows 7 64 bit ISO from the microsoft website. Created another USB booting drive and try the USB creator again. Same result. Crashes right at the end of the program. Right now I have the NUC running on Windows 10. Since everything is USB 3.0 native, there was no issues installing.

My question is, what am I doing wrong here? I mean this should not be this hard to install Windows 7 to a USB 3 based system with the Intel utility. Any thing to be offered here? Thanks for the advice.

 

[nerp]

I always got around this with an optical drive and old school DVDs with the drivers afterwards.

 

[shaggy77]

Yeah the problem is you need the USB ports which are 3.0 which you need for the Keyboard and Mouse operation. On top of that, the Optical Drive would also require access to the USB port. So it would probably fail after the initial file load up. If the utility creator worked, there would not be an issue.

 

[nerp]

I would use a SATA optical drive. Even having it dangling outside the case temporarily just to get those NIC and USB drivers. A mobo with a PS/2 port and ps/2 keyboard also presents a workaround.

 

[shaggy77]

Lots going on around the house. little time to work on this project. Here is the update.

I found an article detailing how to install the drivers via manually. After countless hours, I got the system set up and running windows 7 from the USB stick without any issues. Then I have another USB stick with all the drivers needed to get he graphics and network stuff working. Otherwise, I wish I took the time earlier to look over this helpful article on how to install drivers into the Windows USB boot stick. I might try to learn how to to this will all the drivers so I could just rework the whole NUC one more time with a nice clean install in one shot.