Drivers

[Trouble]

I installed a new hard drive on a friends Dell desktop after his crashed.
After installing XP I had a tough time finding drivers for all the hardware.
Dell's website had a tons of drivers for his build number and it took forever
to find the ones that worked.

I'm thinking I should backup my drivers and while I see a lot of software
for this I would rather understand what I'm doing. Can I just backup
C:\windows\system32\drivers or do I need to do more?

Thanks

 

[Trouble]

Hi David,

Of course I put the files I downloaded for my friend on a CD. But I was
wondering about my machine which is working fine. If I had a hard drive crash
I would like a driver backup along with my data backups.

 

[mikeyhsd]

all the dell cd's I have seen have drivers for their specific hardware.

driver for the harddrive should have been with xp.

what else was missing.

(e-mail address removed)



I installed a new hard drive on a friends Dell desktop after his crashed.
After installing XP I had a tough time finding drivers for all the hardware.
Dell's website had a tons of drivers for his build number and it took forever
to find the ones that worked.

I'm thinking I should backup my drivers and while I see a lot of software
for this I would rather understand what I'm doing. Can I just backup
C:\windows\system32\drivers or do I need to do more?

Thanks

 

[Shenan Stanley]

I installed a new hard drive on a friends Dell desktop after his
crashed. After installing XP I had a tough time finding drivers for
all the hardware. Dell's website had a tons of drivers for his
build number and it took forever to find the ones that worked.

I'm thinking I should backup my drivers and while I see a lot of
software for this I would rather understand what I'm doing. Can I
just backup C:\windows\system32\drivers or do I need to do more?

Really?

You did just go to Dell's site, downloads section and enter in the service
tag of the Dell computer, right? Then choose the proper OS?

 

[Trouble]

I must not have been clear. The Dell is my friends computer. I did go to
Dell and entered the service number and finally got the right drivers but
they had a 100 drivers and I only needed 4 so it took forever.

My computer is not a Dell. It's custom built. It works fine. My question is:
Can I back up the drivers on my computer by copying
C:\Windows\System32\Drivers? Or do I need to do something else? This is just
in case I have a hard drive failure and can't find the original drivers.

 

[John John - MVP]

I must not have been clear. The Dell is my friends computer. I did go to
Dell and entered the service number and finally got the right drivers but
they had a 100 drivers and I only needed 4 so it took forever.

My computer is not a Dell. It's custom built. It works fine. My question is:
Can I back up the drivers on my computer by copying
C:\Windows\System32\Drivers?

No, this won't work!

Or do I need to do something else? This is just
in case I have a hard drive failure and can't find the original drivers.

This is what David and the others have been trying to tell you, backup
the driver files (installation packages) that you downloaded from Dell.
Drivers cannot just be copied into a folder and ka-blam! that's it,
drivers need to be *installed*. When you install the drivers
information the driver information is entered in the registry and the
drivers are configured to run on your system. The driver installation
package does this for you, unless you are just trying to replace a
corrupt file copying a single driver files (.sys files) is of little use.

John

 

[Shenan Stanley]

I must not have been clear. The Dell is my friends computer. I did
go to Dell and entered the service number and finally got the right
drivers but they had a 100 drivers and I only needed 4 so it took
forever.

My computer is not a Dell. It's custom built. It works fine. My
question is: Can I back up the drivers on my computer by copying
C:\Windows\System32\Drivers? Or do I need to do something else?
This is just in case I have a hard drive failure and can't find the
original drivers.

First - what makes you think that if you lost the original drivers you would
be able to find the copy you made at a later date any better? hah

Your computer is working now - right?

Use Belarc Advisor, get a list of hardware devices, download the driver
installation files now - back them up in every way you want. Although there
are applications out there that 'backup drivers' - it would be wiser to get
the actual driver installation files from the actual manufacturers of the
components and save them.

In the time you have taken to get to this conclusion you could have
downloaded those, burned them to a CD, made a copy of your original
installation media and taped both of those things to the inside of the
computer case. ;-)