If you’re planning on starting afresh with a clean copy of Windows 10, your computer will no longer have the applications that you installed or that were preinstalled on the computer. You have the option of keeping the files that you’ve installed, but you might have opted for the option that wiped the files, too.
This means that you might wipe the device drivers from the computer and would then need to reinstall them again. Before performing the clean install, you may wish to take a backup of the device drivers so you can easily reinstall them again when you’re up and running on Windows 10.
This tutorial demonstrates how to backup and restore the device drivers when you’re using a version of the Windows 10 operating system.
Method One: How to Back Up All Device Drivers in Command Prompt
1. Open the Command Prompt with administrative privileges.
2. If User Account Control prompts you and it asks: “Do you want to allow this app to make changes to your device,” click on the “Yes” button to proceed.
3. Enter the following command into the elevated Command Prompt window and press the “Enter” key on your keyboard:
dism /online /export-driver /destination:"path of folder."
Note: Change where it says “path of folder” with the actual path to the folder where you have it on one of your drives. You’ll need to create this folder if you don’t have it already.
5. All of the device drivers will immediately be backed up inside the folder that you specified in the command. You can head there from File Explorer to check them out.
Method Two: How to Back Up All Device Drivers in PowerShell
1. Open the Windows PowerShell with administrative privileges.
2. If User Account Control prompts you and it asks: “Do you want to allow this app to make changes to your device,” click on the “Yes” button to proceed.
3. All of the device drivers will immediately be backed up inside the folder that you specified in the command. You can head there from File Explorer to check them out.
How to Restore a Device Driver Backup in Device Manager
1. Open “Device Manager” from the Power User menu.
2. Double-click on the device from the list that you want to restore a driver for so you expand it.
3. Right-click on the “Update driver” link from the menu.
4. Click on the “Browse my computer for driver software” link.
Note: Some older versions of Windows 10 have a different link that says “Manually install a driver” that you need to click on instead. Both links lead to the same place, so regardless of what yours says, you can still pick up the rest of the guide.
5. Click on the “Browse” button and then navigate to and highlight the folder that contains the backup of the drivers.
6. Click on the “Next” button when you can see the path loaded.
That’s all.
Inigo
February 5, 2019 @ 19:07
I’ve had an unusual problem with the sound on my laptop all of a sudden. Granted, it is partly due to my stupidity of willingly becoming a Windows Insider, a program which I’m yet to be able to get off my computer even though I’ve told Microsoft I want out months ago.
My issue is that all of a sudden my notification tray is showing a red cross on the sound icon, and I’m getting no sound out of anything — no settings, no Windows sounds, no sounds from the internet either. The whole thing is soundless, which as you can understand, has left me moving to another computer.
I know that it will eventually be fixed when I get another Windows update and am taken off the Insider Program like I asked to be, but in the meantime, I’d still like to try to fix it at least. My research leads me to believe that it may be a driver issue, but when I go to update the drivers by following guides, there is no guide that I can follow without my computer having different sets of options than in the guides.