Trouble installing Windows 7 on a UEFI boot system

Just picked up a new PC and tried installing Windows 7. Since there’s no disc drive, I made a bootable USB instead. Plugged the drive in, set the BIOS/UEFI to boot from USB... everything starts fine, then it just hits a wall with this error:

"A required CD/DVD device driver is missing." And then it follows up with:
"You need to install a required CD/DVD device driver. If you have a floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB flash drive with the driver, insert it now.
Note: if the Windows installation media is in the CD/DVD drive, you can remove it at this step without any issues"

Any idea how to fix this?...

Either hunt down an installation package with USB 3.0 drivers, or just plug it into a USB 2.0 port if you can find one

And honestly? You won't be happy running Windows 7 on a modern PC. Even if you somehow track down every single driver, you're still going to run into constant headaches.

Just forget about using Windows 7.

Richard Lee47 said:Either get an installation drive with USB 3.0 drivers already on it, or plug the USB into a 2.0 port if you can find one.

And honestly? You aren't going to be happy running Windows 7 on a modern PC. Even if you somehow track down every single driver... there's always going to be issues.

Just forget about Windows 7...

I tried installing from a USB stick, but once it starts, I hit that error mentioned above and everything just freezes up...

Most of these new motherboards don't even bother with Windows 7 drivers anymore... which honestly doesn't matter much since Microsoft is pulling the plug on Win7 support pretty soon anyway.

Back when I was running Win7 Pro x64 over two years ago, I jumped up to Win10 Pro. It felt way snappier and more stable, but man, that was nothing compared to when I finally did a totally clean install...

Wait, there's no disc drive? Did you buy it that way or did something happen?

It’s honestly just standard practice now to ditch the CD/DVD drive. My son won't even let me install a burner on his desktop, even though there are three empty slots left—he just says it's useless junk these days.
People are literally ripping out disc drives from their laptops just to make room for an SSD upgrade.

Like someone else already pointed out above, newer laptops and motherboards don't officially support Windows 7 anymore—they're built strictly for Windows 10. And look, even if you try to play hacker and manage to force USB 3.0 drivers and all those other little workarounds into the installation, it doesn't mean the OS is actually going to be 100% reliable. Is it really worth the headache?

I wasn't aiming for a perfect score, but it looks like circumstances are forcing my hand...

It’s not actually a bad score, though you should probably factor in a full week of headaches if it's a new build—you know, the usual nightmare of hunting down drivers and getting everything to play nice.

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