Tip for people who want to reinstall Windows

[hsehestedt]

I notice people sometimes requesting drivers for their system after they have tried to install Windows from scratch and then discovering that not all drivers are included with Windows.

Here is tip that I use on my personal computers on how to backup all your drivers BEFORE you reinstall Windows.

To backup all the drivers from your PC, please follow these steps:

1) Open a command prompt as administrator.

2) Create a folder to which you can save your drivers. That folder can be on your internal drive, an external drive, a thumb drive, etc. In the command below, note that I am using D:\Drivers.

pnputil /export-driver * D:\Drivers

If you save the drivers to your local drive, don't forget to move them to another location before you reinstall Windows.

3) After you reinstall Windows, you can restore all your drivers like this:

4) Once again, open a command prompt as administrator.

5) Run this command:

pnputil /add-driver D:\Drivers\*.inf /subdirs /install

Note that you should replace "D:\Drivers" with the location where you have the drivers that you exported.

Please be aware that this may take a little while. Also, at the point where the display driver is being installed, your screen may temporarily flash or turn black for a little while. This is normal!

6) When this process completes, you should reboot the system.

[admin]

An excellent way ！

[Gabe]

As a habit I save the driver folder of each new unit I get to a USB flash drive after the stock installation is fully up to date. It's in C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore.

Though with Windows 10 you have to update each driver piecemeal, Windows 11's Device Manager can install all needed drivers in one shot. Copying the folder to the computer, then using that folder as the search location for the driver updates, gets all needed drivers installed in minutes.