Windows Re-installs made easy.

I have recently built a new PC, so I’ve been planning to format and rebuild the old one to make it into a media server for the lounge to replace the ageing and slow machine already performing that function. One thing I was not looking forward to though was having to find all the drivers for the various parts, its so long since I built that machine that I don’t recall what motherboard, graphics card etc, etc I used when building it.

Now normally when I build a new machine, I’m pretty good with keeping all the driver discs etc together and handy for re-installs, but over time they seem to drift and after 2 years I’d have more chance of finding the Holy Grail that finding those discs.

Luckily a few weeks back I happened across a program that claimed to be able to rip out and backup all of the drivers from a system, ready for import onto a fresh install, so what better opportunity to give it a try.

One swift download and unzip of DriverBackup (which incidentally is free and open source) later, and I’m looking at the main driver backup window.  When the program first opens, it doesnt show any hardware, but clicking the ‘Refresh’ button made it go scurrying off and collecting data about all the drivers in my system.  A few seconds later there was a complete list of drivers and hardware, including some stuff I had forgotten I had even owned, but obviously still had driver files lingering in the system long after I had stopped using the device!  From here you just click the “Start Backup” button, the software asks you where you want it to save the output, so i pointed it to a 4GB usb key and away it went copying driver files merrily.  After about 2 minutes it had finished copying all files, and I was left with a nice directory structure of 1 folder per device, with the folder named after the device.

Sceptical about how reliable this was going to be, I formatted the machine and re-installed XP, and then once at the desktop for the first time went to investigate the state of the device manager.  As I’d expected, maybe half a dozen items with no drivers, most importantly of which the network card. Not expecting much, I right clicked the offending network card and selected to update driver, then selected the option for “look in this location” for the driver, and sure enough after pointing it at the correct folder on the usb key, it had installed the driver fine and the network card functioned as expected, I was pleasantly surprised!  I continued down through every one of the non-functioning items, updated driver and pointed them at the relevant folder on the usb key and they each worked perfectly every time.

I must say I am quite impressed with how effortless this made the whole thing, I half expected to have to spend an hour or so checking what hardware was in the machine and hunting down drivers, but no such pain, all sorted in mere minutes.  Installing the sound card driver didn’t only give me basic sound but still installed the correct surround sound management application as well, I can see no difference between having installed this way and doing so from the original CD or downloaded setup file.

If you have a machine you need to format and re-install, you should seriously consider having a look at DriverBackup before you take the final plunge and format it, it could just save you some wasted time when it comes to getting it all back up and running again!

As usual, comments and suggestions welcome.

~Shepy