Recovering drivers from windows.old  

Thankyou very much, this worked! I appreciate the help alot! :)

thank you Brink! clean install of W7 via an upgrade disc but using OEM prod key off machine decal (had to use MS phone activation - but successful) to avoid bloatware from recovery disc/oem. nagging little voice told me to leave recovery partition undisturbed. mult rounds of WindowsUpdate, including W7SP1, then performed. discovered "SM Bus Controller" not installed and no drivers.

multiple HP and Intel solutions all fail. your sol'n to try:

dev mgr > > update driver > browse > C:\Windows.old\Windows.inf - Windows found and successfully installed driver for "Intel 6 Series / C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller - 1C22". Note: windows warning of "no validation\certification\etc" pop-up did show for this method even though driver was OEM. silly.

frustrating that HP had no offering for driver download, HP Support Assist of no help, HP Recovery Manager (via F11 on boot) offered no "hardware repair" option, Intel Sys Identifier Utility failed, Intel driver update scan failed, and no stand alone driver from Intel avail: "none detected - unknown or unsupported". chipset is Intel H61 rev B3.

YOURS WAS THE ONLY SOLUTION I FOUND, the vast majority merely re-iterating "go to oem, manufacturer, intel, etc"

thank you again. my machine is lean and pristine. hope this helps anybody else w same prob.

Thank You Brink.
I've tried everything as you mentioned, but it worked only for 1 driver but for others like Ethernet Controller, Network Controller, Universal Serial Bus (USB) Controller it didn't work. Windows gave me error windows found driver software for your device but encountered an error while attempting to install

After that I've tried many options to fix that error but the only thing which worked for me was to browse from c:\Windows.old\Windows\System32 and it worked.
I dont know if it makes any sense, but before I tried to recover the rest of the drivers I run Windows in disable driver signature enforcement mode.

Following your topic I helped a friend we had reinsalled win 7 premium .iso from Windows site in Brazil/Portuguese Everything fine but no network drivers as per discussion but the drivers were all hiding in win.old Driverstore! We first tried DRVSTORE with no luck luck but the lower case driverstore had them all! Needless to say we had some drivers backup software to make a copy when all had been retrieved Very often without a driver its almost impossible to know what the device is this took seconds when the right folder was found so disagree thats it`s easier to download when you may be in the dark as what to look for