How to install Drivers in Recovery...

Hello Community!

Is there a way to install Drivers in Recovery?

My Macbook Pro is my main/ primary device. It is a dual booting machine with Windows installed using BootCamp. I also boot into Windows installed on my external Disks.

The problem is when I have to access Windows Recovery on my Mac. The keyboard and mouse don't work because there are no drivers installed in the Recovery Environment. Is there a way to install these Drivers there?

Thanks.

Drvload Use for adding drivers to a Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE) image.

The following command adds a driver to WinRE.



If you keyboard not working not much you can do from Windows RE.

Does your keyboard work when you enter BIOS setup?

FreeBooter said:

Drvload Use for adding drivers to a Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE) image.

The following command adds a driver to WinRE.

Code:

Drvload Driver.inf

If you keyboard not working not much you can do from Windows RE.

Click to expand...

I will check it out. Thanks.

NavyLCDR said:

Does your keyboard work when you enter BIOS setup?

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This is the Mac I'm talking about. Everything works in Mac recovery. It is Windows recovery where they don't work.

You would need to install the windows version of your "Mac's" Keyboard Driver
And you can preload Drivers using Dism into a mounted Windows Recovery Image

It is an Apple Mac, there is no BIOS (UEFI) SETUP at all. The closest thing they have is a boot menu.

By mouse do you mean the internal trackpad @TheMystic ? Or you have an external mouse? If so, is it bluetooth or USB?

Windows PE is not very compatible with Mac and while you can load drivers there, it will probably not help you because the problem is that the USB devices are not initialized in this case. It seems to me that the Apple EFI expects the guest OS to take ownership of (or "re-initalize") the USB peripherals which Windows PE will not perform properly, especially not with the weird bluetooth implementation Apple made.

See, all peripherals, including the USB mouse, and even bluetooth mouse is initialized by the EFI during boot - this can be observed by being able to use the mouse in the boot menu. However after the Windows OS (or the Windows recovery) is launched, this support is not handed off correctly, and it will not work.

In some cases it helps to CLICK once with the mouse to force the reconnection but this doesn't always work.

What you can do instead, is to boot into Mac OS X, and launch the Boot Camp Assistant and tick "Install Windows".
No partititioning needs to be done as that is already done, so instead this option will act like a "boot into Windows install" shortcut.

What this does, is not merely changing the boot order, but also instructing the EFI to fully initialize all peripherals, including Bluetooth mouse. And in this configuration, if the Windows installer/recovery is launched this way, you will have full mouse/keyboard support (USB and bluetooth too) without any drivers.

As you can see, kind of painful. You're much better off doing what you want from an installed Windows system, where you can install BootCamp Drivers. That pack has a bunch of specially modified drivers that enable various hacks around this, to make them work. But even then you have to click once with the bluetooth mouse to activate it. No movements are recognized until you click.

KYHI said:

You would need to install the windows version of your "Mac's" Keyboard Driver
And you can preload Drivers using Dism into a mounted Windows Recovery Image

Click to expand...

Yes. But want to know the actual command to make it work. I have all the required drivers that is installed in Windows on Mac.

SIW2 said:

this is an easy way

Click to expand...

I'll give it a try next week when I'm back home. Thanks.

ish4d0w said:

It is an Apple Mac, there is no BIOS (UEFI) SETUP at all. The closest thing they have is a boot menu.

By mouse do you mean the internal trackpad @TheMystic ? Or you have an external mouse? If so, is it bluetooth or USB?

Windows PE is not very compatible with Mac and while you can load drivers there, it will probably not help you because the problem is that the USB devices are not initialized in this case. It seems to me that the Apple EFI expects the guest OS to take ownership of (or "re-initalize") the USB peripherals which Windows PE will not perform properly, especially not with the weird bluetooth implementation Apple made.

See, all peripherals, including the USB mouse, and even bluetooth mouse is initialized by the EFI during boot - this can be observed by being able to use the mouse in the boot menu. However after the Windows OS (or the Windows recovery) is launched, this support is not handed off correctly, and it will not work.

In some cases it helps to CLICK once with the mouse to force the reconnection but this doesn't always work.

What you can do instead, is to boot into Mac OS X, and launch the Boot Camp Assistant and tick "Install Windows".
No partititioning needs to be done as that is already done, so instead this option will act like a "boot into Windows install" shortcut.

What this does, is not merely changing the boot order, but also instructing the EFI to fully initialize all peripherals, including Bluetooth mouse. And in this configuration, if the Windows installer/recovery is launched this way, you will have full mouse/keyboard support (USB and bluetooth too) without any drivers.

As you can see, kind of painful. You're much better off doing what you want from an installed Windows system, where you can install BootCamp Drivers. That pack has a bunch of specially modified drivers that enable various hacks around this, to make them work. But even then you have to click once with the bluetooth mouse to activate it. No movements are recognized until you click.

Click to expand...

I already have Windows installed using BootCamp on a partition in the internal disk. I haven't tried booting into Windows Recovery on the internal disk (I'm not sure if it has one).

I have an external SSD with Windows installed, complete with a Recovery Environment. I can boot into Windows Recovery on the external disk, but after that can't do anything because neither the keyboard nor the trackpad (internal ones) work in Windows Recovery. I have very faint memories of trying with an external keyboard and mouse (I have the wires ones, not Bluetooth), and I am not sure if they worked.

The Mac drivers for Windows are available (I exported them from within Windows Bootcamp on Mac). If they can be installed in Recovery, then I guess the peripherals would work. But need to know how exactly to accomplish this.

TheMystic said:

I already have Windows installed using BootCamp on a partition in the internal disk. I haven't tried booting into Windows Recovery on the internal disk (I'm not sure if it has one).

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Oh. I must have missed this. There is a difference because in case of the internal storage, boot entries are populated into UEFI and the system acts accordingly. (partially initializes devices, prepares handoff, and the installed Windows can take them over)

TheMystic said:

I have an external SSD with Windows installed, complete with a Recovery Environment. I can boot into Windows Recovery on the external disk, but after that can't do anything because neither the keyboard nor the trackpad (internal ones) work in Windows Recovery.

Click to expand...

I'm sorry, I don't think this will ever work properly. It is not designed to work like that.

TheMystic said:

I have very faint memories of trying with an external keyboard and mouse (I have the wires ones, not Bluetooth), and I am not sure if they worked.

Click to expand...

If the internal peripherals don't work, then externals are unlikely to work either. This is an initialization (handoff) issue which Windows PE does not perform properly. Mac has a workaround for this, but it isn't fired off unless you start from BootCamp assistant.

TheMystic said:

The Mac drivers for Windows are available (I exported them from within Windows Bootcamp on Mac).

Click to expand...

Good

TheMystic said:

If they can be installed in Recovery,

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A part of them can be installed, using the steps the others had written here. However, Windows PE is not a full-scale environment, it is isn't on-par with the installed edition. Not every driver can be installed, and even if you install them, not all of those will work properly. The ability to load drivers in Windows PE is really only designed to provide access to various storage devices (or storage controllers) that wouldn't be accessible otherwise. It is not designed to load I/O drivers as the generic driver should be able to handle it.

TheMystic said:

then I guess the peripherals would work. But need to know how exactly to accomplish this.

Click to expand...

It will probably not. Your idea is partially correct in the sense that it requires drivers.
But as I have written above: it is not only drivers you need, but OS-specific patches that simply cannot be loaded into Windows PE. And on top of that, you need full handoff support as Mac UEFI expects that, however Windows PE doesn't do it the way Mac expects it. For this reason, if you start "Install Windows" from BootCamp Assistant then UEFI boot menu is instructed to load Windows PE with specific UEFI settings, such as full pre-initialization, handoff workarounds and bluetooth pre-connecting.
This simply will not work for your external recovery unless you select "install Windows".


However a much better solution could be if instead of an external recovery, you could use Windows To Go .

Windows To Go is available starting from Windows 8 (also with WIndows 10 and 11 of course) and there is a great tool called Rufus USB that can help you prepare a flashdrive, or even a partition on a hard drive for it.

It is similar to your external Windows PE recovery in the sense that you can carry it around and it is computer-independent. However it differs from it in the sense that it is a full Windows environment (therefore able to take handoffs properly, and load drivers the right way).
I believe this is what you're looking for, and I think this is the only solution that actually can mitigate the issues you're seeing on a Mac.

Keep in mind that even though it is a full Windows experience, it is still a generalized image which means it can boot on any computer, and for that to work, boot time will be longer than if it was a traditional installation, because it is checking for hardware changes and altering HAL if needed.

@ish4d0w


Some things can only be done via recovery, e.g. setting up the EFI Partition. Since I have Windows installed inside Mac as well as on external disk, a Windows to Go disk is unlikely to be too helpful.

What about Macrium ViBoot or similar 3rd party recovery environment? I understand Windows PE is different from Windows RE. My guess you were referring to Windows RE in your post and not PE.

TheMystic said:

@ish4d0w


Some things can only be done via recovery, e.g. setting up the EFI Partition. Since I have Windows installed inside Mac as well as on external disk, a Windows to Go disk is unlikely to be too helpful.

What about Macrium ViBoot or similar 3rd party recovery environment? I understand Windows PE is different from Windows RE. My guess you were referring to Windows RE in your post and not PE.

Click to expand...

Yes, I meant Windows RE. Sorry, I kind of use PE and RE interchangeably because they are similar in purpose and way of work.


Actually, all of what I have written also apply to Windows PE (Windows 7's installer) too. It was even more troublesome back then, when the Windows world was still mainly using legacy BIOS + MBR concepts, and Apple was already using EFI + GPT. Then, Apple decided the best way to install Windows 7 (which by the way supported GPT and EFI booting) on a GPT partition table was to create a hybrid MBR section inside a GPT table, breaking compatibility with every single partitioning tool... read more on that
Fortunately this is mostly history, as with Windows 8 came proper UEFI+GPT mainline support, and so Apple switched to full UEFI feature parity, finally dropping this weird MBR+GPT hybrid scheme.

But one problem still persists. A Mac's boot process is still peculiar, nonstandard in terms of device initialization and handoffs.

For instance, the system firmware handles connections to wireless keyboard + mouse (if they were paired already), this makes them usable from the second the computer is powered on.
This is wonderful on one hand (you can use the wireless bluetooth keyboard at boot time/ before the OS boots, such as to enter boot menu), but it complicates the Windows experience. Because when you boot Windows, it is supposed to take over on this established connection, which it will do if the bootcamp support pack is installed, but will not do in Windows PE/RE.
That is where the handoff workaround is needed, and that is only done if BootCamp Assistant sets up a special temporary boot entry for Windows Installation that does this.

But with that in mind, came the idea to me that, you could examine the NVRAM for UEFI parameters, and the EFI partition , in both places looking for the boot options that are entered after you checked "Install Windows" in bootcamp assistant.

If you really need to enter Windows PE/RE often, then you could manually replicate these changes so the Mac firmware would perform all preliminary steps to enable the same experience you had when you were installing Windows.

These are your options. But then again, I'm not really sure if it is worth it. If your goal is to edit the EFI partition, you can mount it from within Mac OS. It is EFI, with its own syntax, you shouldn't need Windows for it.

I am unfamiliar with Macrium ViBoot but if I see it correctly, this is a Hyper-V VM, which means it would have access to the same devices the host OS would. You could try though, but I don't really understand what you're trying to do with it.
There are many tools for a live Windows OS that enable editing BCD and even the EFI partition.

ish4d0w said:

Yes, I meant Windows RE. Sorry, I kind of use PE and RE interchangeably because they are similar in purpose and way of work.


Actually, all of what I have written also apply to Windows PE (Windows 7's installer) too. It was even more troublesome back then, when the Windows world was still mainly using legacy BIOS + MBR concepts, and Apple was already using EFI + GPT. Then, Apple decided the best way to install Windows 7 (which by the way supported GPT and EFI booting) on a GPT partition table was to create a hybrid MBR section inside a GPT table, breaking compatibility with every single partitioning tool... read more on that
Fortunately this is mostly history, as with Windows 8 came proper UEFI+GPT mainline support, and so Apple switched to full UEFI feature parity, finally dropping this weird MBR+GPT hybrid scheme.

But one problem still persists. A Mac's boot process is still peculiar, nonstandard in terms of device initialization and handoffs.

For instance, the system firmware handles connections to wireless keyboard + mouse (if they were paired already), this makes them usable from the second the computer is powered on.
This is wonderful on one hand (you can use the wireless bluetooth keyboard at boot time/ before the OS boots, such as to enter boot menu), but it complicates the Windows experience. Because when you boot Windows, it is supposed to take over on this established connection, which it will do if the bootcamp support pack is installed, but will not do in Windows PE/RE.
That is where the handoff workaround is needed, and that is only done if BootCamp Assistant sets up a special temporary boot entry for Windows Installation that does this.

But with that in mind, came the idea to me that, you could examine the NVRAM for UEFI parameters, and the EFI partition , in both places looking for the boot options that are entered after you checked "Install Windows" in bootcamp assistant.

If you really need to enter Windows PE/RE often, then you could manually replicate these changes so the Mac firmware would perform all preliminary steps to enable the same experience you had when you were installing Windows.

These are your options. But then again, I'm not really sure if it is worth it. If your goal is to edit the EFI partition, you can mount it from within Mac OS. It is EFI, with its own syntax, you shouldn't need Windows for it.

I am unfamiliar with Macrium ViBoot but if I see it correctly, this is a Hyper-V VM, which means it would have access to the same devices the host OS would. You could try though, but I don't really understand what you're trying to do with it.
There are many tools for a live Windows OS that enable editing BCD and even the EFI partition.

Click to expand...

To give you a background, I will briefly explain what I have done:

1. Installed a fresh image of stock Windows on my external SSD, on my Windows laptop.
2. Ran through all Windows Updates.
3. Connected the SSD to my Mac.
4. Since neither keyboard nor trackpad works, I connected external keyboard and mouse and installed Bootcamp Drivers. Now both internal keyboard and trackpad works.
5. Back to my Windows laptop, booted from the SSD, ran Sysprep, went through OOBE, and installed my favourite apps, configured settings, etc.
6. Now I booted into Windows Recovery (on the Windows laptop), created a system image using DISM.
7. Now I have a custom Windows image with my favourite programs and Bootcamp Drivers, so I can install this image on any external disk, which will boot and run fine on both Windows PC as well as on Mac.

The above is possible because the Windows image contains the Bootcamp Drivers. The handing over of controls (keyboard, trackpad, USB, etc.) is happening properly.

Since the Windows Recovery environment runs properly on all Windows machines, can it not work on Mac if it has all the required Drivers (primarily the keyboard and trackpad)? I think it should be possible. Just need to know how to install these drivers in Recovery.

PS: I don't mind having a more elaborate recovery disk (Windows RE is quite limited from what I know, although it is sufficient for most requirements) if it can do everything expected from a recovery environment, especially those that is possible only via recovery.

Just need to know how to install these drivers in Recovery.

Click to expand...

I have already linked to screenshots that show an easy way to integrate drivers into a wim image.

Winre.wim has only one image

SIW2 said:

I have already linked to screenshots that show an easy way to integrate drivers into a wim image.

Winre.wim has only one image

What is the difficulty?

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I am not at home for the next couple of days. I'll give it a try once I'm back home.