How to reinstall Windows 7 and get your drivers back

When the worst happens, and your computer won’t boot, and Windows 7 is unrepairable, you are faced with the frustrating task of reinstalling Windows. There is often a recovery partition that you can use to go back to factory settings. However, you might want a clean install of Windows, without all the crapware bundled by the manufacturer, plus you usually have to install Windows 7 Service Pack 1. One of the frustrations of reinstalling Windows from DVD, especially on laptops, is that many device drivers are missing after you reinstall, and you have to go to the manufacturers website to download them again, not so easy if you are missing LAN/WiFi drivers…

Sometimes it is a pain even if you know what you are doing. If you look in device manager, right-click on the device that is missing its driver, click properties, details, and then change the drop-down to hardware IDs, you can see a VEN_ID and DEV_ID value, eg for a missing driver on a laptop I’m working on, it  shows PCI\VEN_168C&DEV_0032&CC_0280. There is a great website to look these up, the PCI Vendor and Device Database. This can be a good way to find drivers when the PC manufacturers website is terrible. For the example I gave, this shows the vendor is Atheros, and the Device is an AR9485WB-EG. In this case, both the Asus and Atheros websites were of no help, so I found another solution.

If you can still get data off your old (or about to be formatted) hard drive, you can also get the drivers. Here is the procedure:

• Copy the following two folders to a removable drive. I’m not sure both are needed, but both contain driver files.
  windows\system32
  windows\inf
• If you are re-installing due to malware, you need to scan this device for malware using a secure fully patched and protected PC, and preferably by using a Linux live CD or Virtual Machine.
• Reinstall Windows 7
• Insert the removable drive
• In device manager, right-click the device without a driver, and choose update driver software. A dialogue will ask if you want to search automatically or browse my computer. Choose browse my computer and look for the removable drive. From there, Windows 7 will cleverly find the right driver from the list. Repeat this until all the devices have drivers.
  In one case, the driver installed failed on the first run, because it depended on another one being installed first, but it installed fine after a reboot.