Hi:
I recently had an aggravating situation with a Windows 10 clean installation that was driver related with Device Manager reporting unknown devices.
What I found out, is that if the machine is online (connected to the net), Windows 10 will normally “scrape” the net and download any missing drivers and install them. It’s a pretty similar to some other OS’s.
In my case, the machine was offline at the time of OS installation. It was simple to install Windows 10 with a USB device, but what about the unknown device drivers ? I still wanted those drivers, and it would be nice to have a backup of them. Keep in mind that I had manually searched for the drivers both at the manufacturer website and on the internet without any results.
After searching the web for a answer I could understand with my rather limited technical skills, here is my rather convoluted solution.
1.With Device Manager still reporting the unknown devices, I used the following elevated command and saved all the drivers to a directory I had previously created. In this case: DriversOld
dism /online /export-driver /destination:” D:\DriversOld “
(You’d want to change the path and directory to whatever you create)
2.Then, I connected to the internet and allowed Windows 10 to download and install the 3rd party drivers that I was missing.
3.Next, with Device Manager now reporting that the unknown devices now had drivers, I used the same elevated command and saved all the drivers to different separate directory I had previously created.
dism /online /export-driver /destination:” D:\DriversNew “
4.The result was that I had two directories “Old” and “New” that I could compare. This allowed me to quickly identify the drivers that had been downloaded automatically and save those folders for future use.
Mike
