I'm trying to make a simple Virtual Disk backup of my OS disk and store it on an external USB3.0 Western Digital Passport drive. I seem to be able to create the backup folder for the VD just fine on the external drive. I have used the embedded Recovery Media Builder 3.0 to create a bootable thumb drive for the restore. I did NOT use the advanced option to inject any extra Network or Disk drivers. I want to test the restore process, so I booted from the Recovery Media thumb drive. It boots fine but the external USB3.0 drive that contains the Virtual Disk folder does not show up in WinPE. All of my SATA disks appear. I have tried two different external passport USB drives connected via USB3.0. Neither of them appears in the Recovery Media WindowsPE environment. I have tried rebooting the WinPE recovery media several times but the drives never appear. They always appear when I boot normally into Win 7 Pro. Can anyone suggest why the USB3.0 drives containing the Virtual Disk folders are not showing up? Do I have to inject special drivers when creating the bootable recovery media thumb drive? If so, where do I get the inf files? I can't do a restore if I can't find the Virtual Disk files. Hope someone can help. Thanks, Mardon (Erbland)
Download USB 3.0 Host Controller drivers for your chipset. Extract them in a folder. When you create a Recovery Media add these drivers in your build. Or, you can simply add a folder with the drivers on the already created thumb drive, then every time you boot from a thumb drive will have to "add drivers" to see the devices connected to the USB 3.0 ports.
Thanks fireworker. I now have a question about getting the ".inf" version of the driver. An ".inf" file seems to be required for injection into the Paragon Recover Media builder. I have a GA-X58A-UD3R motherboard that has a Renesas USB3.0 Host Controller. I have found the current driver (2.0.34.0) at both gigabyte.com and driverzone.com. Unfortunately, both files are ".exe files". I have been unable to find an ".inf" version of this driver file. How can I add the driver to the Recovery Media build when it requires an ".inf" file instead of "exe"?
Most use the Renesas USB3.0 Host Controller as does mine. Did you use the AIK or ADK when you created your bootable thumb drive? This has come up before, IIRC the explanation is/was that USB 3.0 drivers are included in the ADK. I used a USB 3.0 docking station although I switch to a WD My Cloud a while back. Unless they broke something, you don't need to install drivers for your USB 3.0 drive.
This .exe file(http://download.gigabyte.us/FileList/Driver/motherboard_driver_usb3.exe) is an auto-extract archive. Open it with archiver and extract the desired folder (x64 or x86 motherboard_driver_usb3.exe\usb3\Files\). or just run this exe, extract all and find needed folder.
How did you build the WinPE? Because another option is to build a WinPE 5.0/4.0 based on Windows 8.1/8, which contains drivers for USB 3.0. These drivers may not be as efficient (fast) as the Renesas drivers on some hardware, but that´s another matter.
Thank you for all the replies. After reading the suggestions, I installed the 8.1 ADK on my Win 7 PC and then used it to build the WinPEx64 Boot Media. As wptski and Robin pointed out, the USB3.0 drivers are built into the ADK and my USB3.0 drive containing the Virtual Disk appeared just fine when I tested the Virtual Disk Restore.
