Solved Load drivers outside of windows

[pacaveli420]

Does anyone know of a tool that will allow you to load drivers into a windows installation? while not actually booted from that installation? MSDaRT allows you to look at things...but doesn't give you an option to load new drivers

background: I have a PC that does not have proper chipset (no USB) / LAN drivers.
this means when windows loads I cannot use any USB devices and my NIC doesn't connect as it doesn't have a proper driver. so...basically I can't do anything.
MoBo does not have any PS/2 connections.

 

[alphanumeric]

I would think that USB drivers would be pretty universal by now. Just about every motherboard on the planet uses one of a hand full of USB controllers and those drivers are included with Windows driver base. I'm sure you've probably done this but I'll ask anyway. Have you gone into the BIOS and verified that USB is enabled? May also want to check to see if USB Legacy support is enabled too? If you can't get into the BIOS with your USB keyboard I would reset the BIOS to defaults with the motherboard jumper.

 

[pacaveli420]

yeah it's not really a USB thing - that's why I suspect it's the chipset drivers that it really needs
KB and Mouse work just fine outside of BIOS or in Windows PE and such
but as soon as the PC is loaded into Win7 I get nothing from them (still power)
BIOS has USB enabled as well as legacy support for them

 

[fseal]

Have you tried booting in safe mode which should load only bare bones drivers? It may load different USB drivers that allow your KB to work well enough to load the normal chipset drivers after that...

 

[pacaveli420]

of course - same thing in safe mode though =\

 

[pbcopter]

Have you tried copying the drivers to a folder on the same hard drive as your operating system from within Windows PE,
then point to the copied drivers when in Windows 7?

 

[SIW2]

Dism

 

[alphanumeric]

If the keyboard and mouse don't work in Windows there is no way to point windows to the drivers though. If you could log in though remote desktop maybe?

pacaveli420 is this after a fresh install? If it was working and then just stopped I think I would just reinstall Windows. Even if it is a fresh install I think I'd just start over and see if it happens again. Maybe its just a one time glitch. With no working keyboard or mouse your options are severely limited. Also what kind of hardware are we talking about here, is it new, old or really old?

 

[pacaveli420]

Have you tried copying the drivers to a folder on the same hard drive as your operating system from within Windows PE,
then point to the copied drivers when in Windows 7?

I renamed the drivers folder and then copied the drivers folder from PE over yes
I did nothing further than that though. is 'pointing' done via registry? or where would I set that up?

 

[pacaveli420]

Dism

thanks, I'll look into this, I'm not 100% sure if it'll be able to do it, but I need to read up on it more

 

[pacaveli420]

If the keyboard and mouse don't work in Windows there is no way to point windows to the drivers though. If you could log in though remote desktop maybe?

pacaveli420 is this after a fresh install? If it was working and then just stopped I think I would just reinstall Windows. Even if it is a fresh install I think I'd just start over and see if it happens again. Maybe its just a one time glitch. With no working keyboard or mouse your options are severely limited. Also what kind of hardware are we talking about here, is it new, old or really old?

no LAN driver
new hardware
I'm sure a reformat / reinstall would fix it, I was trying to avoid that is all

 

[SIW2]

Driver Servicing Command-Line Options

Check your drive letters from winpe.


IF windows is on E and the drivers you copied over are in E:\Driverfolder

Dism /Image:E: /Add-Driver /Driver:E:\Driverfolder /Recurse

Note drivers MUST be .inf format - you cannot install exe

 

[pacaveli420]

Driver Servicing Command-Line Options

Check your drive letters from winpe.


IF windows is on E and the drivers you copied over are in E:\Driverfolder

Dism /Image:E: /Add-Driver /Driver:E:\Driverfolder /Recurse

Note drivers MUST be .inf format - you cannot install exe

yup - I read the article from when you first posted. I was just a bit mislead at first due to the referring to the windows install as 'image' all the time. I will try dumping all my motherboard drivers (from the disc) into my windows install and see what that does

thanks for the help - hopefully this works!

 

[pacaveli420]

DISM didn't work. the command itself worked but it didn't achieve what I needed
after getting into the drive (I put it into a PC with PS2) i found the issue wasn't that drivers weren't loaded but that they weren't starting / working.
for anyone else trying to do the same thing, the lower/upper filters had to be removed
Your CD drive or DVD drive is missing or is not recognized by Windows or other programs
same procedure as this except you do it for the USB drivers
I just ended up formatting anyways. there were too many other things that had changed on the new setup and drivers weren't loading properly (I had trouble with some of the ACPI stuff)