Unknown Devices: How do you determine and find MS downloaded drivers ?

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[Mike]

Not sure if this is hardware or software.

Issue

When I was installing a complete new installation of Windows 10 Home, and after applying all the drivers I could from the manufacturer’s website, I was left with 9 “Unknown Devices” listed in the Device Manager.

After looking at the properties for each of these, they all seemed to be ACPI related.  Calling the manufacture was worthless and I never got beyond the basics.  So I turn to the experts here.

It’s been my experience in the past that sometimes when you connect to the net, Windows will parse and fetch unknown device drivers from Microsoft.  Most of the time, these very drivers are supplied by the manufacturer…..odd as it seems.  And….that’s exactly what happened with all 9 of the “Unknown Devices”.

What this really comes down to is that I would like to have my own local copy of these drivers for future installations.

So, is there a method to find them on my machine ?   Or some other way ?

Probably a tough question, but I’m hoping.

Mike

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• This topic was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by Mike.

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Once your system is loaded with drivers, there are some utilities to back them up for future installs.  I remember Double Driver https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/double_driver.html

Also there is this article with a few ways https://www.askwoody.com/newsletter/easily-back-up-all-your-pcs-current-drivers/

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Mike

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Mike wrote:

So, is there a method to find them on my machine ?   Or some other way ?

have you tried ‘check for new hardware’ in device manager ?

Do you use a USB hub with multiple ports ?

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Mike

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@Alex.  They were downloaded and installed automatically by Windows.  All the “Unknown Devices” were cleared.

What I would like is to find those specific drivers (only) on my local drive and save them to…. say a USB drive for future offline installation.  Hope that makes sense.

Mike

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See if How to Backup Drivers Windows 10? How to Restore? Get the Guide! (minitool.com) helps. You can copy the backup folder to a USB drive.

--Joe

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Mike

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Mike wrote:

What I would like is to find those drivers on my local drive and save them to…. say a USB drive for future offline installation.

The following link is to an article that describes 3 ways of backing up your currently-installed drivers (and how to restore them again).

How to Backup (Export) and Restore Device Drivers on Windows 10?

I’ve used the PowerShell method (from an elevated console) and it’s very, very simple to do. The only thing to watch out for is that there’s no confirmation or visual indicator what’s happening, like a progress bar.

From the moment I entered the command and pressed RETURN/ENTER was just less than two minutes… and created a folder structure like this:

(On my laptop the contents of the folder – which you need to create beforehand – ended up as ~837MB. Obviously yours will be different but I mention this to give you an idea of the potential size.)

You can also add logging, if you wish. Have a look at this Export-WindowsDriver MS doc for more info.

Hope this helps…

 

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Mike, Drcard:))

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This is the case if the machine here is the Lenovo you posted about and this “should” fetch what you need:

https://support.lenovo.com/gb/en/downloads/ds012808-lenovo-system-update-for-windows-10-7-32-bit-64-bit-desktop-notebook-workstation

If you want to decide what gets installed the detect here gives you a list to download from – suggest you start with the chipset drivers, then power drivers and their application..

https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/en/products/laptops-and-netbooks/thinkpad-t-series-laptops/thinkpad-t420i/downloads/automatic-driver-update

Otherwise if it’s another machine completely, I’d look myself – example attached for a dead device. Right click a device, select properties, click on the details tab and drop the box to hardware IDs

Here the example I attached the manufacturer is Intel (086) and if you google intel 3b67 it reveals a chipset too old to be of much use.. yours will of course differ.

You may well find it is an Intel device as much of the common infrastructure is supported as they use a lot of common intellectual property between their chips, but to get them working fully you need the correct drivers, in which case the driver tool at their site will help assuming your chipset is still in support..

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download-center/home.html

AMD also do likewise but seem a little new to the idea.

Neither of these will collect OEM specific drivers, however. You must go to the manufacturer for those as they’re often “tweaked” as the hardware is configured that bit differently. The structure of the hardware data you provided suggests this.

(OEM – Original Equipment Manufacturer – Dell, Lenovo etc)

If you can locate a working install (for example if you left the image partition in place and have a BIOS based recovery (on line or local) open to you as it seems a fresh install contains nothing you need to keep) for an installation supporting the same hardware, the drivers can be backed up with the Windows PNPUTIL tool also:

https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/can-you-install-windows-11-home-without-a-ms-account/#post-2404020

Once they’re backed up you can then level with the Microsoft media again and hopefully import them. Unfortunately if you’ve removed all the partitions (or in the case of Lenovo formatted drive C where the hidden Lenovo folder was likely to have been) then you’ll need to download the drivers from the manufacturer’s support page.

If you ran a repair and selected “don’t keep my files” You could get lucky and find recovery options still give the option to factory default somewhere in the menus – hold the left shift key as you click “shutdown” when powering down through the start menu was used to get the recovery options up at next boot..

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Mike

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