Injecting xHCI drivers into WHS2011 Client Recovery USB stick

[Umfriend]

I know, not exactly the right forum ;-) but there are some tech savvy people around here and, honestly, I have no, absolutely no clue what slipstreaming is or how the boot process works or what a BCD file is etc.

So I have this windows 7/Windows Server 2008 based bootable USB stick that runs a client recovery program for clients connected to my WHS2011 Server.

All is fine expect that W7/WS2008, by default, do not boot off of xHCI USB interfaces because they only have drivers (?) for EHCI interfaces.

I know some have been able to inject or slipstream xHCI drivers into W7 installation DVDs or USB sticks. I would like to do that with my USB-stick but where to start investigating what is actually needed?

To be sure, xHCI drivers are available. They just do not seem to load (early) enough at boot. It is actually weird, the BIOS does allow the USB to try to boot but then I get:
"Windows failed to start. A Hardware problem " bla bla bla
"File: \EFI\Microsoft\BCD
"Status: 0xc00000d
"Info: An error occurred while attemptin to read the boot configuration data."

Any ideas? If I can get this to work I ma sure I will become the hero of the orther seven WHS 2011 users out there!

[UtwigMU]

The bootable USB might be created with EFI in mind. But your machines might be booting as legacy BIOS. Corporate OEM desktops usually allow for EFI or BIOS mode. You could try switching that in BIOS first.

[UtwigMU]

http://www.eightforums.com/installation-setup/57684-boot-problem-digital-signature-winload-exe.html

Also found this which may be of help.

[Umfriend]

The USB can boot both under BIOS as under EFI and the lappy has both modes available as well but that does not matter as it is not the issue.

The issue is that W7 (and WHS2011 is W7/WS2008 based) does not, by itself, support xHCI USB interface, only EHCI. So while the lappy does boot a bit, which I think means that EFI finds a boot record or something that it executes, the executable that loads first in the boot process then can not actually read from the USB stick as it does not know how to address the xHCI USB interface.

It is a common problem and was written about quite a bit as it meant that W7 would have issues being installed on Intel 100 chipsets. For W7 itself, slipstream solutions are available given the support and large number of users but for this specific WHS2011 no easy tools are available. So I was hoping to understand what and how W7 install USBs are upgraded and how I could do that with mine.

[UtwigMU]

Could you reverse engineer the slipstream for W7 and apply manually?

[Umfriend]

Well, I guess it *can* be done, but not by me, no.

So anyway, I guess I am reasonably fine as is. My company uses Dropbox so those files i do not backup anyway. Everyone at home stores on the Server anyway, so it was only really to OS/App installation that I am worried about in the sense that a BMR does it soooo much faster. Anyway, I'll get a W-10-server based solution this or next year and until then it'll just have to make do.

It is a great laptop I got me though, very happy with it.