How can I reinstall Windows 7 on a laptop without the drivers CD?

Question

I have lost my ASUS drivers CD that came with the laptop. I want to reinstall Windows, but I'm afraid that I'll need drivers to make the laptop fully functional. The trouble is, when I tried to find the appropriate drivers on the ASUS site, all I've found is a slur of bloatware, useless utilities and whatnot. They don't simply give a "drivers package" that I can install after installing Windows.

How can I find the appropriate drivers package for my ASUS laptop?

Solution 1

This is normal. What you are looking for (a nice, packaged driver set with all the drivers for your laptop) does not really exist. This is generally something you only see with business-class laptops from the tier-1 vendors like HP, Dell, and Lenovo. Unfortunately, you're going to have to download the drivers one-by-one.

The best course of action here would be to install a vanilla copy of Windows 7. Once the install finishes, open up Device Manager to see which specific devices you need drivers for. Then you should download those drivers directly from the hardware manufacturer's web site (you may need to use a USB flash drive on another computer if you don't have network/wifi drivers).

Often a device will show up with either a generic name (e.g. "PCI Serial Port") without any identifying marks, or simply "Unknown Device". Here's how to identify them and get the drivers:

1. Double-click the driver in Device Manager and go to the Details tab.
2. Select "Hardware IDs in the Property dropdown. In the Value box, you will see the device's full PCI ID string in the form of PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_1C3D&SUBSYS_04AD1028&REV_04. The parts of the string are separated by the ampersand (&) character. Make a note of the VEN_ and DEV_ portions of the string. The VEN_ portion is the device manufacturer, and the DEV_ portion is the model.

3. Go to the PCI Database website and input either the Vendor ID or Device ID (numeric portion only) in the boxes and hit Search. NOTE you can only search for one or the other, not both. In the example above, the 1C3D corresponds to "Intel(R) Active Management Technology - SOL"

4. Once you know the vendor and the model you're looking for, you can usually go directly to the hardware manufacturer's web site (in this case, Intel and search for the driver there.

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There are two things you should definitely be aware of when doing this process:

• Firstly, some vendors do not publish drivers on their own web site. This is particularly true of Atheros (some WiFi cards) and a lot of audio drivers. In these cases, you will have to find the driver on Acer's web site. There's just no way around it.
• Secondly, be VERY careful when Googling for drivers. Trust only the manufacturer's own web site or the laptop maker. Searching for drivers on the internet gets you viruses and spyware faster than searching for porn (or free screensavers).

Solution 2

A small trick that I have learned when wiping and re installing Windows is when you go to select the partition that the OS is installed on it will display this message

This is fine. What I learned is that it will keep that Windows.old folder on your hard drive that contains the driver for your peripheral. After clicking okay and installing and configuring Windows, find your Network controller in the device manager.

Right click > Update Driver Software > Browse my computer for driver software and click Browse. Navigate to C:\Windows.old\Windows Use that folder and perform the scan. Because the directory Windows.old contains all of the drivers from your previous OS it should find the driver that was available before you formatted.

Comments

[Ramhound]

All the drivers on the CD you lost are on the ASUS website, on the product website for your laptop, I am speaking from experience.

[Aleksandar Stefanović]

@Ramhound , so I have to download each "utility" separately, or am I missing something out? And also, should I downlaod "Azurewave BlueTooth driver" or "Liteon BlueTooth driver" ? I'm really lost here...

[Ayan]

@AleksandarStefanović yes you need to download each and every driver individually for your VGA, audio, WiFi, etc. of your laptop. And its not that hard to find the drivers on Asus's site once you know the model number you are looking for. I never faced any trouble finding any driver on their website.

[Ramhound]

@AleksandarStefanović - Which driver you download depends on which device you have. Only download the drivers you need. Your display driver for instance can be downloaded from ( Intel, AMD, Nvidia ).

[Incarion]

While this answer provides extensive and comprehensive way of installing drivers from scratch, if the drivers in your current Windows installation work fine, I would suggest you use third-party software to backup your drivers and, after re-installing the OS, you can restore them with the same software. What I've used and has fulfilled my needs in such regard is DriverBackuo, but there are other options out there

[SilverWarior]

While this approach works with desktop computers all the time it might not be the best when finding drivers for a laptop computer. Why? Sometimes laptops have somewhat modified drivers to ensure compatibility and stability of laptops specific hardware configuration. So installing drivers from specific hardware manufacturers site might not guarantee full compatibility and could lead to various issues. So it is much better if you go and download the drivers from the Laptop manufacturers webpage instead.

[Ramhound]

This just requires significant amount of storage. This isn't really a solution. Much easier to just download the drivers again.

[hyperj123]

I ran into this problem when I forgot to download drivers prior to running a clean install. It does take up a lot of space but afterwards you can simply clean up old installations of Windows operating systems. My issue was that I did not have another available computer to pull the drivers for my laptop. This will find the driver and only install the basics to get you online.