We recently got a batch of new workstations on campus that are using USB3 for half of the supplied USB ports. We had some problems during the WDS setup of these as there is no native support for USB3 in WinPE 3.0 as supplied with Windows 7 Service Pack 1, and of course our WDS boot menus use WinPE 3.0.

After hitting F12 to initiate the WDS setup WinPE happily loaded but obviously offered no mouse or keyboard support when using the USB3 ports. Okay, you could swap mouse and keyboard to USB2 and this would immediately resolve the issue. However, best to get the USB3 drivers into PE. I did this using the driver injection method as blogged about previously: WDS How To – deploy drivers See the section titled: “Boot image driver injection has become very easy!” (WDS dynamic driver management is excellent, I may have mentioned that before… )

For those of you who don’t know, USB3 ports are coloured blue on the inside, so you can easily spot them if they’re there: