Solved Recovering drivers from windows.old

[Secret Squirrel]

Hello everyone!
I've recently upgraded from windows starter to windows 7 ultimate 32 bit on my Acer aspire one D255 netbook and it is missing drivers for Ethernet Controller Network Controller and Video Controller. I could download the drivers from my pc and transfer over with a usb stick... but this has to be the day i left my usb stick at a friends house. AGHHHH! So, is there anyway i could get the drivers from the windows.old file and get it to work.

Thankyou for reading this and hoping for a swift response.

Love, Secret Squirrel

 

[Brink]

Hello Secret Squirrel, and welcome to Seven Forums.

You might see if you can use Device Manager as in the tutorial below. When you get to step 5, browse to and select the folder paths below to try and see if Windows 7 may be able to "Automatically" find your drivers in there.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/97061-driver-install-device-manager.html


C:\Windows.old

or

C:\Windows.old\Windows\inf

or

C:\Windows.old\Windows\System32\drivers

Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[Secret Squirrel]

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

 

[Brink]

You're most welcome. I'm happy to hear that it worked for you.

 

[khmiller]

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.

 

[Melanhols]

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.

 

[Busy Bee]

Had Success

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