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Two nights ago Windows Defender asked me to update some drivers, which I did but now I get a black screen with some cmd.exe title on it that disappears in a matter of seconds.

I only got to read something about drivers, and I assume it's because drivers were not "well-installed", so I searched windows and it gave me the option to restore windows to a restore point set before the drivers updated.

I restored twice today, the first time it said it could be restored because of an error, and it gave me the option to try again, which I did, but I got the same error. Besides, I keep getting the black screen every 30 minutes or so.

I read a reset would clean my laptop, but, will USB ports, internet connection, screen or audio related drivers be deleted too?

Giacomo1968
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Marcela
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3 Answers3

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You could. That said - its really easy to dump drivers natively in windows to a folder, that you can reload with device manager.

There's a built in powershell commandlet that'll do it - here's the documentation for it

This will work both online and offline

Export-WindowsDriver -Online -Destination d:\drivers

Will dump all third party drivers to d:\drivers

Since I'm generally using this to get fresh installs on 'new' systems without good OEM support, I'd use this to 'fill out' drivers windows can't find itself. To install the drivers, you can go to device manager, and install drivers for unknown devices manually, pointing the wizard to the drivers folder.

For a machine with good support, naturally you'd want to do fresh installs for whatever you can, but this will help fill the gaps very efficiently.

In your case, it'll let you either get a known good set of drivers, or the drivers you had at the point of the issue.

Journeyman Geek
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Windows is not guaranteed to have drivers for all devices. So you do risk finding yourself with some drivers missing.

What I suggest :

  1. Try to restore from an earlier restore point. If this works you may stop here.
  2. Download all suitable drivers from your manufacturer
  3. Take an image backup of your entire system disk to an external media using AOMEI Backupper Standard Freeware.
  4. Use AOMEI to Create Bootable CD/DVD or USB Flash Drive Based on Windows PE
  5. Boot this media and ensure it can see the disk with your image backup.
  6. Now you can reset the computer, and install missing drivers.
  7. If you come up against an unsolvable problem, restore the backup as a last resort.
harrymc
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All the drivers windows has access to are located here:

C:\windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository

Make a backup on a thumb drive.

If you have missing drivers point the device manager to said folder on your thumb drive and it should find them.

cybernard
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