Intel Dual-Band 8260AC PCIe not found in Win10, found in Ubuntu

[morrisbenji]

TL;DR Ubuntu finds and uses a PCIe Wifi card just fine, but Windows can't find it. (Apparently needs USB header connection on MB?)

Long Version:
I use a PCIe card with the Intel Dual Band 8260AC chipset. The interesting part is that it has a USB 2.0 header on it that you're supposed to plug into a header on the MB. I had it installed this way previously and it was working fine til last night. I upgrade my CPU/MB/RAM, but the new MB is one USB 2.0 header short. The old MB had 3, all filled, but the new MB has only 2 USB 2.0 headers and 1 USB 3.0 header, so one device is left out. I decided to leave the wifi card plugged into the PCIe slot, but not plugged into a MB header and fire it up and make sure everything else was working. 

No surprise, but I had no wifi. Figured maybe a new driver might solve the issue as it seems weird to need both a PCIe slot and a USB connection. So I dug out a USB wifi dongle I had and proceeded to update/install every possible driver, BIOS, etc. for the new MB and the wifi card. Still nothing.

Just out of curiosity I rebooted into Ubuntu (latest 17.10), and voila! Wifi worked! I removed the USB dongle just to make sure, but it definitely works just fine in Ubuntu, but Windows 10 cannot find the device. This is without the USB connection BTW. I've installed and reinstalled the driver, but no dice.

Any thoughts on getting Windows to recognize the card without the USB header connected? And any thoughts on why Ubuntu can find and use the device just fine while Windows seems unable to?

[morrisbenji]

Huh. So it seems Windows doesn't recognize it even with the USB header plugged in. This is annoying.

[Steve K.]

On 12/1/2017 at 10:17 PM, morrisbenji said:

Huh. So it seems Windows doesn't recognize it even with the USB header plugged in. This is annoying.

Sounds like a driver issue. Any chance you're just not picking up the right driver?