Fresh Windows 7 install doesn't find drivers

I have a Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit upgrade disc and a Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit installation disc. I was repartitioning my desktop to dual boot ubuntu and a third partition for data. The partitioning didn't complete and it broke the windows 7 partition. I tried to recover it using the windows disc but it couldn't save the o/s. So i did a fresh install of Windows Vista and setup the partitions for ubuntu and data in the Vista disc. After installing Vista I upgraded to 7. The 7 install didn't find drivers during the install. It doesn't see my monitor as anything but a Generic PnP, so I can't increase the resolution beyound 640 x 480, and it can't even find the ethernet connection.

I tried restarting the computer but it didn't help. I wanted to see if somehow it was a hardware problem and just was really weirdly timed up with my install, so I installed ubuntu to see if it was just windows 7 having a problem and it was. Ubuntu sees everything fine and gets internet. I tried to manually download the ethernet driver for my motherboard but the only downloads the manufacturer have didn't work. The motherboard is an Asus P8z77 V, the only driver downloads I could find from their site are for Intel Ethernet drivers, and when I try to install them it says no device found for the drivers.

I should mention that I already had this exact version of Windows 7 Ultimate installed on my computer before I reinstalled it. Does anyone have an idea on what could be causing this? I just realized I should have tried to install just Vista to see if it's Windows in general that's having problems or just the 7 install. I'll be doing that over the next few hours and I'll update this post when I do.

What do you believe could be causing this problem?

AddRAM said:

You don`t have to install Vista to use your Ultimate Upgrade disc, in fact you should do a clean install with your upgrade disc. In order to get drivers you have to run windows update and in the case of your video drivers, you should be going directly to the manufacturers website. ( of the video card )

Clean Install with a Upgrade Windows 7 Version

Windows 7 is not 100% driver complete but it`s dam close.

Vista is probably the worst operating system windows has ever produced and in no way should you leave it the way you have it, and everyone here will agree.

Haha yeah I don't have Vista installed, I have Windows 7. When I installed it after ruining the partition I had to install Vista first because the partition was so ruined it couldn't find the previous 7 installation. When I reinstalled it after that I did it straight from the 7 disc. Both of those installs were clean installs off the upgrade disc. I'm going to try and install Vista just to see if the vista disc is able to install the drivers that 7 can't.

I can't run windows update to get the drivers because it doesn't have the drivers for the ethernet, so I'm not getting internet to update. I have an xbox wireless plug so I'm going to see if I can get internet through that, it seems like the only drivers that it can see are the usb 2.0 ones.

AddRAM said:

You should have known that you might need your network drivers before you did the install. What machine are you working on ? And what video card do you have ?

I've installed from that 7 disc 2 times before on that computer with no problems, and I have a laptop so I can download drivers from this and then transfer on my external hdd. My video card is a 560 ti, but that's not my concern right now. If I can get the internet drivers to work then I can just update the graphics card from that computer. Manually installing the drivers on the graphics card will make it look nicer but there's no point right now since I can't access the internet to use those pretty graphics.

I installed Vista on it since there was nothing installed on 7 anyway, it doesn't get internet either but it sees a network adapter. It shows it as a PCI-E adapter, which is weird because I don't have a PCI-E adapter, I'm running off of the motherboard. Windows 7 showed a generic ethernet port, not a PCI-E ethernet adapter. The PCI-E adapter shows as a Realtek RTL8168/8111 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Adapter, I'm going to install the latest adapter for it to see if it does anything.

The hardware is:
i5 3570k
Asus P8z77-v motherboard
EVGA gtx 560 ti
8GB Corsair ddr3 1333 mhz RAM

I'd wipe the HD first with Diskpart Clean Command to clear the boot sector in case code is interfering, then follow these same steps to get a perfect Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7.

If Win7 doesn't provide the ethernet driver which it does in 90% of installs then have it in your backup to install and immediately do all of your Important and Optional Windows Updates after enabling Automatically deliver drivers via Windows Update (Step 3). Once all rounds of Updates are done import any drivers still missing in Device Manager from the device's Support Downloads webpage.

It won't let me clean it since the i'm running windows on the same disk as the boot sector. Will it work just as well to reformat the entire disk, boot partition included, in the windows 7 install disc? I'm not worried about losing my ubuntu boot or data partition, there's nothing in there since I lost all the data originally.

You cannot wipe the HD from itself. Run Diskpart Clean Command accessing DISKPART At PC Startup

I ran the disk clean and reinstalled, but the drivers did not install with it. However this time the drivers I got from Asus actually installed. Last time it said failed, but this time they went through. I'm still not sure why the drivers weren't installed with Windows 7 since I installed on this exact hardware less than a month ago with the same installation disc and they were.

Thanks for the help, something was going wrong with the installations and they weren't letting drivers install I guess but wiping the disk fixed it.