Offline - Drivers or Device Manager View  

Hello fellow forum readers.

I have a question, I had another tech pull a hard drive out of a computer that is overseas and send it to me for re-load (long story as to why). I was wondering if anyone knows of software like the device manager that will let me view the devices that are installed on this hard drive while connected to another machine.

Currently I have the drive that was shipped to me connected to my machine via a USB connector. I see the drive and wanted an easy way to see what drivers were loaded on the drive before I re-load it.

Thanks.

WindowsStar said:

Hello fellow forum readers.

I have a question, I had another tech pull a hard drive out of a computer that is overseas and send it to me for re-load (long story as to why). I was wondering if anyone knows of software like the device manager that will let me view the devices that are installed on this hard drive while connected to another machine.

Currently I have the drive that was shipped to me connected to my machine via a USB connector. I see the drive and wanted an easy way to see what drivers were loaded on the drive before I re-load it.

Thanks.

just a guess here WindowsStar ,couldn't you run a 3rd party app like driver genius on it and let it find the drivers for you

Great Idea: However, Pebbly, wouldn't that look at my machine? I want to see the drivers loaded on the hard drive attached to my machine. I haven't used driver genius before; does it have an option to point it to another windows load?

Hi WindowsStar. Can't you look in the hard drive at C:\Windows\System32 and WOW64? I know its a big old list, but it might give you an idea.

severedsolo said:

Hi WindowsStar. Can't you look in the hard drive at C:\Windows\System32 and WOW64? I know its a big old list, but it might give you an idea.

I have looked there but you need to weed through everything. I what I would like is an Offline Device Manager so I can point it to the hard drive, the software look at the drivers and the registry then tell you what is loaded as if the drive was in the original machine and booted up. Then I will know what I am facing before I do anything. Looking at the directory means a lot of work figuring out what is what.

I've just had another Idea.... How about loading the HDD into a VM and booting like that? That will give you access to the Device Manager at least.

I think you have no other choice than what Severedsolo suggested. Slow and tedious method but you'll find most of the drivers, selecting Properties from the context menu shows what driver you are looking at.

severedsolo said:

I've just had another Idea.... How about loading the HDD into a VM and booting like that? That will give you access to the Device Manager at least.

There you go....I had not had that idea. Now how can I do that without changing anything on the drive? Which way would be the best way to go about that, VMWare??

WindowsStar said:

severedsolo said:

I've just had another Idea.... How about loading the HDD into a VM and booting like that? That will give you access to the Device Manager at least.

There you go....I had not had that idea. Now how can I do that without changing anything on the drive? Which way would be the best way to go about that, VMWare??

To be honest I have no idea how to do it. Give me a bit, I'll have a play around and see what I can do.

You could try Disk2vhd, to make a vhd from that disk. Then it's easy to mount it to Virtual PC, or if the image is above VPC's maximum vhd size 127 GB, to VirtualBox or VMWare.

One problem that I can think of here is that when mounting that as a boot device on a virtual machine, some of the devices are changed to emulated virtual devices.

Kari