Backing up the drivers in the Windows 10 operating system must be done before reinstalling the system, or before making changes to the computer hardware. This is the easiest way to reinstall drivers.
The user can archive the drivers installed on the computer in order to restore all drivers after the system is reinstalled, or in case of a system failure, restore the required driver from the archive. Sometimes, it is difficult to find the necessary drivers, especially for laptops, as manufacturers often equip the same model with hardware from different manufacturers.
Backup drivers are performed by specialized programs for working with drivers, for example, free program Driver Pack Solution. You can back up the drivers installed on your computer directly in Windows 10.
In this article, we will look at four ways to back up drivers in Windows 10: two ways using command line and two ways Windows help PowerShell.
Before backing up drivers, first create a folder in the root of the drive (directly on the drive itself) where you want to save the backups. Give the folder a friendly name English language, in this example I named the folder "DriverBackup".
Backing Up Drivers Using the Command Line
Run command prompt as administrator. Enter the following command into the command line interpreter window (you can copy it from here):
pnputil /export-driver * D:\DriverBackup
Please note that you can only have a "C" drive, not a "D" like mine, as well as a different folder name. Replace the "D:\DriverBackup" part of the code with your data. In the following codes from this article, also change part of the code to your location to save the drivers.
Wait for the drivers to finish copying, which will take some time. After the process is completed, the result of this operation will be shown in the command line interpreter window.
After that, you can open the folder in order to make sure that the backup copies of the drivers are saved on the computer.
Backing Up Your Drivers Using DISM
The second way to save a backup copy of the drivers will also be done on the command line using the DISM.exe utility.
Run command prompt as administrator. In the command line interpreter window, enter the following command (pay attention to the drive name and the name of your folder):
Dism /online /export-driver /destination:D:\DriverBackup
Then press the "Enter" key on your keyboard.
After that, the process of exporting driver copies to the folder selected for saving will start.
When finished, close the command prompt.
Backing Up Your Drivers in Windows PowerShell (1 Method)
Run Windows PowerShell as an administrator. Next enter in Windows window PowerShell following code:
Export-WindowsDriver -Online -Destination D:\DriverBackup
Then press the "Enter" button.
Wait until the drivers are exported to the backup folder.
Everything, copies of the drivers are saved.
Backing Up Your Drivers in Windows PowerShell (Method 2)
The second method differs from the previous one in that in the save folder will be created text file with a description of the saved drivers.
Run Windows PowerShell as an administrator. Enter the following commands (copy from here):
$drivers = Export-WindowsDriver -Online -Destination D:\DriverBackup $drivers | ft ProviderName, ClassName, Date, Version -auto | Out-File D:\DriverBackup\drivers.txt
The backup process will take some time.
After the export is completed, open the folder selected to save the backup. There you will find the "drivers.txt" file, which contains detailed information about copied drivers.
Restoring drivers from a backup in Windows 10
To install drivers from a backup after reinstalling windows, copy the backup copy of the drivers from the permanent storage to HDD computer.
In the "Update Drivers" window, to answer the question: "How do you want to search for drivers?", select the "Search for drivers on this computer" option.
In the next window, select the folder on your computer where the drivers are saved, and then click on the "Next" button.
Then install the required driver from the suggested list.
Conclusion
On the Windows 10 operating system, you can run backup drivers without using third party programs, by means of the system. Backing up drivers is done using the command line and Windows PowerShell.
If you decide to reinstall windows, then for its further normal operation, you will need to install all the necessary drivers so that there is sound, games run, and other functions work normally. Therefore, in order not to complicate your life, it is easier to make a copy of the drivers from existing system windows. This will save you the lengthy process of searching, downloading and installing them again. To do this, the article will consider a set of free programs for extracting drivers from windows systems.
Programs for saving a copy of drivers from windows
1. Driver Extractor - a small and free program that can save a copy of all drivers installed in the system in a short time.
Official site driver-extractor.rusc.ru
The program does not have a lot of bells and whistles and a variety of functions, this can be seen from its visual interface, which means it is only for extracting the drivers we need. It's nice that everything is categorized here.
Of the pluses, this is a small size and direct purpose, of the minuses there is no Russian language, although it is not really needed here, and there is no function (I personally did not find it) to restore firewood to the system. That is, you will need to manually specify the path to each driver, which is not very convenient if you have to restore not a small amount, but if 3-6, then this is tolerable.
All latest operating systems starting from xp are supported.
3. DriverMax
Official website innovative-sol.com
This free program has a very beautiful user interface. Initially, this program comes as a firewood updater, but the backup and restore function is also present, which made it possible to include the program in this list. English interface, support all latest windows.
Visually, the program differs from the previous ones, but functionally there are practically no differences. The main purpose of this program is to copy and restore drivers. This software is freely distributed and works on almost all versions of windows. Works surprisingly fast, the whole copying process took less than a minute.
The program can save to the archive if necessary. There is no Russian language, but as I wrote above, it is not needed.
Download Double Driver (Yandex disk)
So the choice is yours, on my own I would recommend using the programs from point 2 or 4. In my opinion, these are the two most convenient programs for extracting and restoring drivers from windows. I tried to choose free options, so that there would be no problems with activation or registration and other things, and of course there are many paid alternatives, but I think why pay if you can not do this.
Anyone who has installed operating systems on their own or at least added or changed individual hardware components knows what drivers are. Before reinstalling the operating system, you need to take care of the availability of drivers for all hardware in advance, but what to do in a situation where such drivers are not available? It's good if you can find the necessary drivers on the Internet, but for some hardware components, especially for "brand name" technology, this is often not possible. In such cases, help special programs, designed to be retrieved from the system installed drivers.
Driver Extractor 1.0
The main purpose of the DriverExtractor program is to prepare for reinstalling the operating system. The main task is to extract the drivers installed in the system. The program shows a list of installed drivers, its interface resembles a manager Windows devices(shown in the screenshot above), which is pretty handy.
Flag Only present devices (Only existing devices) is used to display in the list only present in this moment devices (after the physical removal of the device, its driver remains in the system). Flag Only non-Microsoft drivers (Only non-Microsoft-driver) is used to display device drivers of all companies, except Microsoft, t. Microsoft drivers are included in the operating system installer and usually do not need to be extracted.
To display a list of device driver files, double-click on it with the left mouse button or select List driver files from the File menu. To save the specified files, you need to click the Save button and select a directory for saving, in which the program will create a directory with the name of the device and save the shown files there. The program completely recreates the device driver, including the INF file required for installation.
Another item from the File menu - Make SnapShot (Create a snapshot) is designed to create a snapshot of the drivers installed in the system for the currently available devices. The cast is a plain text file with a simple structure and is saved in a file with the "SN" extension. Calling up a list from a snapshot is possible via the SnapWindow item.
The Utulities program menu is for shortcut Windows Device Manager and a dialog about installing a new hardware.
As mentioned at the beginning, the main purpose of the program is to prepare for reinstalling Windows, and for this, in addition to drivers, you may need information about serial number and passwords stored in the system.
The program provides information about both. In addition, when you click on the Show them all button, all passwords hidden under asterisks using internal funds operating systems Windows line 9x (with Windows NT/2000/XP the situation is more complicated).
The author of the program is the Russian programmer Alexey Aleksandrovich Mokrov, who also wrote the well-known recovery program deleted files back2life.
Driver Extractor 1.0 (size 200Kb): link
My Drivers 2.11
The My Drivers program is intended for the same purposes as previous program- detection, extraction of installed drivers and their subsequent recovery after reinstalling the system.The program also has the ability to search latest drivers for installed hardware.
To display all drivers installed on your computer (except Microsoft drivers), click the Fast Collect button.
To see all drivers without exception, click the Collect All button.
When displayed, the drivers are displayed in alphabetical order according to their descriptions, no other sorting is provided, which is somewhat inconvenient. To extract the required driver, select it with the left mouse button and click the Make button, to extract all drivers - the Make All button.
Compared to the Driver Extractor program, driver extraction takes much longer. for this, all the files that are part of the driver are searched, while the Driver Extractor program extracts the driver files at once.
Additional features of the program: creating a self-installing version of the driver as an EXE file, creating a package of all installed drivers into one self-installing EXE file, and writing each device driver into a separate CAB file.
All these features, as well as the already familiar options for extracting the selected driver from the system (or all at once) are available through the Make menu.
However, a surprise awaits unregistered users of the program: the self-installing version of the drivers does not work without entering the correct registration code for the program.
Additional feature that the program provides through the Plug-in menu is the saving of Favorites and settings Outlook programs(the user manual also mentions saving Outlook Express settings, but the program does not work with Outlook Express).
You can use the unregistered version of the program for 15 days. Registration fee is $29.
Driver Detective 2.0
Driver Detective 2.0 is a program related not only to drivers. With its help, you can view the versions of DRV, DLL, and VXD files located in a specified directory (by default, the Windows system directory). The files of these extensions are referred to as drivers. You can view file versions yourself by calling file properties from context menu Explorer, but with the Driver Detective program, this can be done much more conveniently. Driver Detective 2.0 is distributed free of charge.
You can purchase more than new version- Driver Detective 3.1, costing $30. With it, you can find and download new drivers for your installed hardware.
Download Driver Detective 2.0 (size 1.95Mb): link
How to install drivers on Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 8, Windows 7, Vista, XP?
What is manual or automatic installation drivers?
We will try to explain in a language understandable to everyone, without abstruse phrases and complex terms! The principle of manual, simple or automatic driver installation for the above operating systems is the same.
So, let's begin!
Automatic driver installation
You downloaded the driver from the site, it can be either in the form of an arj, zip, rar archive (simple archive), or as a single file with the exe extension (self-extracting archive). A self-extracting archive (installdriver.exe example) is a startup file that already contains compressed files that do not require third-party programs for unpacking, you just need to run it, point to an empty folder you created on your disk and the archive itself will unzip the drivers there.
Simple arj archive, zip or rar - in this case, you also need to create an empty folder on the disk in advance and unzip all the files from the archive there, just unzip and not just run the archive, the fact is that often many novice users, having downloaded the archive, simply open it through "Start" or "Run", while the archiver program simply shows the contents of the archive in the form of a list of files and any attempts to run something from the archive will result in an error, so remember that first of all, the archive must be unpacked into an empty folder you created separately, for To do this, in the archiver program (for example, WinRar) there is a button "Extract to the specified folder" or "Exctract to" after which you simply indicate where to unpack the archive and wait for unpacking.
Now the most important!
You unpacked the archive into a folder you created in advance, went into it and saw the setup.exe or install.bat file or any other startup file with a different name, just run it and the installer will do everything by itself, you just have to restart the PC (if the installer does not will do it himself) and enjoy the working device.
Now consider the option when you unpacked the archive into a folder you previously created, went into it and saw an incomprehensible set of several files with the extension inf, ini, sys and others, while launching exe files or bat simply does not exist. This may be because it is often difficult to find drivers for some devices on the manufacturer’s website itself, especially if it is already outdated, while the installation disk for the device has long been lost by you or maybe it didn’t exist at all, in this case to the rescue resources come that have a rich library of old but up-to-date drivers where they are usually stored in this form, that is, in the downloaded archive there will be no installation programs, but only the files of the driver itself, which we now have to install.
Manual driver installation
We have a folder with several files. What's next?
1.Go to "Device Manager"
2. We are looking for the necessary equipment in the list for which you actually downloaded the driver, as a rule, a non-working or malfunctioning device is placed exclamation mark which is hard to miss.
3.Click on the device with the left mouse button, highlighting it, then click right button mouse - a menu will open, select "Update drivers"
4. A large window will appear "How do you want to search for device drivers"
5.Selecting the top item " Automatic search updated drivers" Windows itself will find (though not always) the driver needed for the device on the network, this is "automatic driver installation". But we need to install the driver we have already downloaded from our folder, so we select the bottom item "Search for drivers on this computer", after which the "Search for drivers on this computer" window will appear, everything is simple here, click "Browse" and look for your folder where we threw those downloaded drivers with incomprehensible files;), as a result, in the window we have the path to the folder with files , click "Next", now Windows will do everything itself and, if necessary, restart the system.
That's basically all, we sincerely hope that this little article will help you install the driver you downloaded and necessary equipment will work great and make you happy. Good luck friends and let everything work!
Before you reinstall Windows on your computer, you should take care to save all the necessary data that is located on the OS disk (usually drive C). In this article, you will learn how to keep the drivers when reinstalling.
If you don’t have to take special care of the programs, since after installing fresh Windows they can be easily reinstalled, then trouble can happen with the drivers. It will take a long time to search and select the necessary software for devices. An uninformed user may encounter difficulties, while a professional will have to spend a lot of time. In general, the best option is to keep the drivers when reinstalling and then just restore them.
Each external or internal device The computer has its own software, a driver that allows it to work normally. Some drivers are installed with Windows. The rest must be installed separately. If the driver is not installed on the device, it will not work or will not work correctly.
How to save drivers when reinstalling
Driver Genius is required to keep the drivers when reinstalling. Download link below. Download it and install it on your computer. An internet connection is required at startup as the program needs to be updated.
Remember that if you change from one version of Windows to another, then backup copy drivers may not be suitable for a freshly installed OS, since many drivers are written separately for each version of Windows. In order for the backup copy to be restored normally, you need to run it on the same Windows versions on which it was created.
- Activate according to the instructions in the archive Driver program Genius.
- Run it and click on "Back Up Drivers". The scan for installed drivers will begin. Wait until the end of the process.
In the next window, in the "Select the backup type" list, select "Auto-Installer Archive". This is the most convenient way to save drivers when reinstalling, since deploying a backup does not require any extra manipulation. Therefore, I recommend it. In the same window, select a location to save the driver backup. Obviously, the backup does not need to be saved on the same disk partition on which you have installedWindows. Click the Browse button to select a location. Click the "Next" button and wait for the reservation to complete. It's not very long. At the end, click the "Finish" button.
Wait for driver backup to finish 
Finish copying Then make sure that the backup is saved in the selected location, and start reinstalling Windows. After reinstalling Windows, run the backup file, select the right drivers and install them.
Expand driver backup