Need setup dvd for P8Z77-V Delux

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I am fighting getting Win 7 moved to a new motherboard without a clean install. After much grief, I think I am close. I still have a number of drivers and tings to install. But this is the first time in a week for screwing around that I have actually gotten my Windows install to actually boot.

However, my optical disk drivers will not recognize DVDs being present. They have the wrong driver. My drivers are on the setup DVD.

I made the mistake of uninstalling the optical drives. Now I can't see them to tell them to update drivers.

Which drivers deal with the optical drives?

Does anyone know where I can get a copy of the setup disk to download? No success at the Asus site?

[parsec]

Re: Need setup dvd for P8Z77-V Delux

Your main problem of course is trying to move a Windows installation to a new mother board/PC. Preparation for that starts while the Windows drive is still on the "old" PC. Depending on the "old" PC, uninstalling some of the drivers may simplify the never to be perfect move to the new PC. If you were moving from an AMD system to Intel, that is the worst case situation. The amount of incorrect and obsolete entries in the Windows Registry will be incredible.

What you wrote about the optical disk "drivers" does not make sense. There are no drivers specifically for optical disks, or any kind of HDD or SSD on the board's setup DVD.

The drivers I assume you are referring to are for the SATA controllers on your board, the Intel and either Marvell or ASMedia secondary SATA chipsets. If you are booting a Windows installation now, a driver for the Intel or other SATA controllers, depending on what you have your drives connected to, has been installed by Windows automatically, or the SATA driver you used previously managed to work. You could not boot the PC without a SATA driver, and you cannot install drivers for individual drives, only SATA controllers. You may have uninstalled the optical drives drivers, but the only source for those is Windows itself.

"Uninstalling the optical drives", I also assume means you disabled them in Device Manager, or removed their drivers for some reason. If you'd like to get them back, do the following:

First, if there are entries for the optical drives in Device Manager, try the Windows Update Driver option, so Windows can replace the drivers you removed. If that fails, continue below, otherwise you should be done after a reboot.

Shutdown and unplug the PC from AC power. Open up the PC and remove the SATA power cables from the optical disk drives (ODD), just unplug it from the back of the drive. While you're in there, be sure the SATA data cables from the ODDs are connected to the Intel SATA II ports on your board. Check the manual for their location.

Also check the location of the Windows drive, is it connected to one of the Intel SATA ports, or one of the others? If it is not connected to an Intel SATA port, you should be able to move it to an Intel port, unless you had everything connected to the Marvell or ASMedia ports. If that was the case, just leave it for now.

Close up the PC, connect to power, and start it up. Check Device Manager for ODDs, which should not be listed. That is what you want to see. If you did see entries for ODDs, you may need to clear the CMOS/BIOS to get rid of them.

Once again, shutdown and unplug the PC from AC power. Open up the PC and connect the SATA power cables to the ODDs. Close up the PC, connect to power, and start it up. Your ODDs should be back and functioning. If not, the current Windows installation has been so messed up, we'd need to be sitting in front of the PC to figure out what state it is in.

BTW, any and all drivers you possibly need are listed on your board's download page on the ASUS website. There is nothing on the board's DVD that is not available for download on their website. Whatever you need can be downloaded on one PC, put on USB flash drives, and then loaded from the flash drive, if necessary.

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Re: Need setup dvd for P8Z77-V Delux

Thanks for your response.

I am indeed moving an installation to a new MB. I am using Reflect, which has a feature to do this. Unfortunately I misunderstood how much the program dealt with to make the move. Not a lot apparently. There are a couple of devices I should have deleted before I made the move, but I did not think of it at the time. Too late now. Primarily some serial and parallel port cards. The OS is generally working correctly after a number of manual driver updates.

Re optical disk drivers: Yes, this was in the Device Manager. I had loaded the appropriate SATA drivers from Asus, but Device Manager showed 3 optical drives (there were never more than 2) and they were using drivers for an alternate application's driver. After some fooling around (best description) the 3 optical drives were showing in Device Manager, but not visible as a drive in Explorer or disk management. I deactivated the associated application using the drivers then deleted the devices to try to install the correct information. I reinstalled the AHCI drivers and nothing fixed the Device Manager view (actually lack of) of the physical optical drives. I see no way to recreate the existence of optical disk drives. Thus I can not use the install DVD. Nor can I create a DVD.

I will try the unplug/shutdown scenario and see what happens. I do not recollect the BIOS being aware of the optical drives. Will look again.

I suspected all the files on the install DVD can be downloaded, but there seemed to be an easier way using the DVD. Quite possibly the wrong understanding. I previously downloaded all the the drivers from the Asus website, but it was to a drive that for some reason I am having a difficult time getting it recognized by the OS. Yet another unsolved issue. The DVD would be a simple way to try again.

Another possibility I have considered, is to upgrade to Win 8. That process will probably fix all of the driver issues. At the moment, that is not possible because Win 7 has already decided it is illegal (from switching motherboards) and Win 8 requires booting from a running, valid copy, of Win 7. I have found every original Windows disk back to Win 95, for all of my machines, but still have not found the Win 7 disk (key) for this machine. I am considering randomly digging in the yard to see if I buried it out there. I have way to much crap in the house. I also really really don't want to be exposed to the native Win 8 interface. If that were the way I wanted to interface to a PC I would simply stay with XP and buy some serious hallucinogenic drugs. It was so idiotic to eliminate the start menu and assume you had (wanted) a touch screen. Apparently getting lots of money and power creates a serious God complex in software architects (while also causing dysfunctional design glands).

[profJim]

Re: Need setup dvd for P8Z77-V Delux

Even if you have an OEM version of win7, you should be able to make it a legitimate copy if you call Microsoft tech support and explain that your motherboard died and that your current motherboard (and/or cpu) is a replacement.

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Re: Need setup dvd for P8Z77-V Delux

All you really need is the product key from your Windows 7 installation. Here's a link to a page with 14 free product key finding programs:

14 Free Product Key Finder Programs

A Windows 7 64bit ISO installation file can be downloaded legally and with the approval of MS. Links to those downloads:

Official Windows 7 SP1 ISO Image Downloads

Ahh, the Windows 8 myths, legends, and "burn the witch" mob mentality. I am using Windows 8 now, and spend almost zero time in the Metro interface, one click at most and you're at the desktop. Heck, stick a USB flash drive in a USB slot, and when you boot up the PC, it will go to the desktop and open the file explorer. I do not have a touch screen monitor, and no need for one either.

Yeah, no Start button, which can be added for free if you like. Otherwise you click Search instead, which dares to display all your choices on one screen across your entire monitor, while hiding everything else, since when you are searching for something you really need to be looking at something else, right? So instead of hovering the pointer over one tiny line, and squinting at another list of tiny entries that appears, that will disappear if I move the pointer one millimeter in the wrong direction, I can see everything from ten feet away.

While a multi-tasking display of many windows does not work well on small tablet PCs, the concept of "what my current focus is should be in my face!" used judiciously in a multi-tasking environment is really quite nice.

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Re: Need setup dvd for P8Z77-V Delux

I actually have Belarc installed and looked up the key. However, when I selected activate now, it just went ahead and activated. No key asked for. The other machine insisted on the key before activating. I still have not found the original disk. I have a slip streamed SP1 disk I made before if I should need it. That was the one I used to try to repair the install after the move failed. I am still considering installing Win 8. I am just not sure I want to have to deal with it.

A note about search vs start menu with list. Quite frequently I do not remember the name of the program I want to start. I have a lot of them and my memory is not what it used to be. Searching for the app is not an acceptable approach as far as I am concerned. I am not too crazy about the "fixes" currently believed to be in 8.1 either. There are more things changed to no obvious advantage for the user in Win 8. Some sorts of things that MS has moved around at each release for no humanly discernible reasons except the could. They never made finding required functions and easier to find. And then there were the "ribbons". Don't get me started. I absolutely hate them.