Hal's Hardware Haven
~~by Hal Cardona, PC Sleuth

Backing Up and Restoring Drivers

This month Linda has asked all of us to do short articles on backing up your system. Since I write about hardware, we felt it was appropriate for me to write about hardware drivers. I’ll be talking about what drivers are, how to identify those you need and what order you should install them.

What are drivers?

Drivers are software and settings that allow your operating system to interact with your hardware. When restoring your system, you may need to restore some hardware drivers for your PC. Some drivers are built into your operating system. For example most modern operating systems can use any video card without additional drivers, albeit usually with only 16 colors at 640x480 resolution. 

I normally make sure that I have back-ups for all third party drivers (those that aren’t included in the operating system) needed for my system. Probably the most important drivers, though, are those that you can't get on the Internet. Once you have Internet access, you can download any other necessary drivers. In my case that means I need drivers for my Network Card. For some that may mean modem drivers. Of course in either case you will need any settings necessary to access the Internet through your ISP.

How to find out which drivers you need.

The most reliable way to keep track of the drivers your system requires is to keep all of the CDs and diskettes that come with your hardware. If you download a new driver from a manufacturer, you should keep it in special folder with other downloaded drivers. One thing to keep in mind is that if the driver comes in a compressed format, you should decompress it prior to putting it in your drivers folder; you may not be able to decompress a zip file when you are restoring your system. 

If you aren’t sure which devices in your system require third party drivers, you can find out by examining the device manager. You can get to Device Manager in Windows 9X and ME by right clicking on My Computer and selecting Properties then the Device Manager tab. 

To get there in Windows 2000 or XP, right click on My Computer and choose Manage then click on Device Manager in the left side pane. 

Once you are there, the method of identifying which components use third party drivers is the same: 

1. Click on the plus sign next to each category to expand to show the devices installed.
2. Double click on a device and then select the Drivers tab
3. If the Driver Provider is anyone other than Microsoft, then the device is using a third party driver and you should have a backup of the driver.

Windows 9X/ME:

 

Windows 2000/XP:

Some Common Third Party Drivers:

Some devices in your computer almost always require third party drivers. They are:

1.  Motherboard and chipset

2. Video Card

3.  Sound Card

4. Multimedia Keyboards

5. RAID Controllers

6. DVD Decoders

7. Printers

8. Network Cards

9. Modems

10. USB Devices

Where to get drivers.

The best place to get drivers for your hardware is from the manufacturer of the hardware. You can usually use the Device Manager or your systems documentation to find out who manufactured your hardware. 

In some cases, you may be better off getting your drivers from the other sources. If your hardware manufacturer has gone out of business a couple of good driver sources are www.windrivers.com and www.driverguide.com. 

In some cases, you may not be able to identify the actual manufacturer of the hardware, but you may know the manufacturer of the chip used on the card. In those cases, get a driver from the chip manufacturer, i.e.: you are running an NVIDIA GeForce based video card, but don’t know who manufactured it, so in that case you can go to NVIDIA’s site and download the reference drivers for your OS.

How to install drivers after restoring your OS.

If you do a clean installation of your operating system, you will need to install all the third party drivers for your system. If you purchased a pre-configured computer, use the instructions that came with it. In general, I use the following order to reinstall drivers:

1. Motherboard or chipset

2. RAID Controller (if applicable)

3. Video Card

4. Network Card or Modem

5. Sound Card

6. Keyboard

7. Mouse

8. All other devices

Congratulations, you’re done!

If you backed up the all the third party drivers for your system, all of your hardware should now be working properly. Now you can start installing your applications. 

I hope you enjoyed this month’s article. As always if you have any comments or ideas for new articles, please let me know via e-mail at abcomputer@pcsleuth.com. I need to say that this is not an offer to provide free technical support, if you need help with your computer I recommend trying Yahoo Groups at http://www.yahoogroups.com.  There are groups covering just about every topic. Some good groups are:

Vic’s WinTips at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WinTips-Tricks/

Linda’s MS Office Group at:
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/mso

My WinXPHelp group at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WinXPHelp/

Computer Help and Discussion
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Computer_Help_and_Discussion/ 

Have fun and I’ll see you next month!

Hal Cardona, PC Sleuth, serves as tech support and/or offsite Sys Admin for over 200 clients around the US.  He designs, builds, and troubleshoots networks and builds custom computer systems.