"A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing" and other errors

TerekC · 30 Jul 2015

What I'm trying to do:
Ultimately, I want to have a clean install (wipe everything) of Windows 10 on my computer.

What my computer state was before the trouble:
Windows 7 Home Premium and Linux dual boot. Everything worked great and dandy (except intermittent issues with DVD drive not reading disks). All my files were saved to external hard drive. Ready to be wiped and have just one instance of Windows 10 installed (No dual boot)

What I did to break it:
I deleted my Linux partition using the instructions found here.
I also had 3 other partitions, my primary one which has Windows 7 on it, and two others that care pre-installed on the machine when I purchased it brand new. I can't recall their labels but I think one had "data" in the name with some numbers, and the other was "restore". I might be totally wrong about that though.

I decided, "What the heck, I've never needed these before" and so I deleted both of those as well. I'm guessing this was a poor decision but what do I know. The computer ran fine while it was still on but when I rebooted (to see if my linux partition was gone) that's where it all went wrong.

What's wrong and how I've tried to fix it:
When I start it up, I get a black screen with the grub rescue terminal and this text: "error: no such partition grub rescue>". Don't know much about grub (anything at all actually) but after some googling I tried to create a Windows Repair Disk and run it. Burned the disk following the instructions here.

Put it in my computer, checked BIOS, verified that it would boot from DVD drive before hard drive and started it up. Exact same issue. As mentioned above, my DVD drive has intermittent issues reading disks.

Assuming intermittant has become always, I'm guess that's why this didn't work.
Then I decided to create the Recovery Tools on a flash drive. I followed the instructions here, made sure BIOS would read from a flash drive first, stuck it in and booted it up. Got a black screen with saying this "Error loading operating system" and nothing else.

Decided to try the USB drive with the exact files Windows had put on my disk, so I reformatted the flash drive, copied the files over from the DVD I had burned (the contents were nearly identical. 1 file had it's name in all caps before and it was lowercase afterwards) and tried again. This time I got this error and nothing else "Missing operating system".

At this point I decided to just download Windows 10 and try a clean install of that. I downloaded it to a flash drive using instructions here and tried to install it.

This time it actually pulled up the Windows 10 install page where I can choose "Install now" or "Repair your Computer". I selected "Install now" and it required my product key. I gave it my Windows 7 key (which I triple verified) but it kept telling me "Invalid product key". Fine. Not sure why, but fine. Went back and selected the "Repair your Computer" option instead. Then "Troubleshoot" -> "Reset this PC" -> "Remove everything" -> "All Drives" -> "Reset". It goes for a few minutes and then very generically tells me "There was an error resetting your're computer".

At another point I tried selecting only the primary drive (instead of all drives. Not sure what other drives it even thought I had at first though) with the same results. At another point I tried to reset but keep my information and it gave me this error "The drive where windows is installed is locked. Unlock the drive and try again." And at another point I retried exactly the steps of the first Windows 10 "Repair your Computer" but before it got to the part where I select a drive I got the error "Unable to reset your PC. A required drive partition is missing".

Lastly I downloaded a copy of Windows 7, put it to another flash drive (following instructions here) and tried using that. When trying a clean install I get the error "A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now." And when I try to "Repair your Computer" there is no operating system selectable to repair.

That about sums up my efforts so far. Anyone know how I can fix this thing?

EDIT

Here's a few more things I've tried:

I Verified my copies SHA value using the SHA values found here.

Re-downloaded WIndows 7 on another USB drive and attempted using that one (incase there was some kind of corruption that took place during copying on the first).

I tried a number of proposed solutions found on this site for similar problems including the following:
Tried the one here.
I made sure this wasn't problem.
I tried a "Clean all", reformat and repartition as described here via asuggestion found here
I tried all steps here via suggetions here.

Still no dice after all these.

TerekC · 11 Aug 2015

Solved it! And then went and cried in a corner because it was so simple.

Something I had failed to realize in the past was that of the 4 USB ports on my laptop, two of them are USB 3.0 ports. During my efforts, I had tried the thumb drives on (by sheer chance) both of the 3.0 ports rather than the 2.0 ones. My laptop (and most other modern computers I believe) require extra drivers to be downloaded before being able to use the 3.0 ports that aren't on the computer's firmware. That was the drivers it was complaining about not having.

So, for other troubled souls having the same issue in the future; verify that the port you are trying to load the USB on is a 2.0 port rather than a 3.0 port. The difference is pretty easy to spot when you're looking for it. USB 3.0 ports have an "SS" (for Super Speed) next to the US symbol, whereas USB 2.0 ports do not. See below image for a visual.