Tip for people who want to reinstall Windows
Posted: Sat Mar 04, 2023 5:58 am
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.
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.