Today I found myself needing to perform a fresh Windows 7 installation on a newly build box using a GA-F2A88XN-WIFI. Upon doing the build I realised that I couldn’t just slip a spare PATA DVD-ROM drive into the case in order to perform the OS install as the motherboard only supports SATA. The logical choice seemed to be to use an external USB connected DVD-ROM drive, however during the first stages of the OS installation, a dialog popped up saying that there was a driver missing and that I should install it now. As the motherboard manual had said this would be the case, I pointed the installer at the directory suggested by the manual … only to find that the dialog remained stubbornly present.
As the manual tells you to put the BIOS into RAID mode (even if you’re not using RAID), I went through several iterations of changing BIOS and trying different driver files, including downloading fresh ones from Gigabyte’s website.
Finally turning to Google, a Tom’s Hardware post pointed to the fact that my troubles were in fact related to the fact that I was using a USB-based DVD-ROM drive. As I didn’t have a spare SATA DVD-ROM lying around which I could throw in the machine, I turned to a very helpful post which details how to use Serva to install Windows via the network. All I needed to do was drop the RealTek network drivers (rt64win7.cat, rt64win7.inf, rt64win7.sys) into the $OEM$\$1\Drivers\NIC directory (as detailed in Serva’s manual) and the rest was very straight forward.
