The worst thing about a format and reload is that sometimes, it is impossible to find all of your drivers.
Usually I have lost the driver disks. If it is a “White Box Special” that I built from NewEgg…well I will have no idea what components I put into it.
I have found an excellent solution – a free tool called “Unknown Devices”
Zip on over to Halfdone Development and download a free copy. Don’t let the old build date fool you – the program still works quite well…even on Windows 7 and Vista systems.
When you download it, make sure you extract the exe *and* the zip file…and they remain in the same folder. I made a mistake of thinking the zip file was not necessary. It contains all of the driver lookup information.
A good example is a white box that I built a year or two ago. I formatted it, and could not even remember who made the motheboard.
A peek at the device manager shows the unknown devices:
Easily found by this cool little utility. Run it, and bam – it shows me a list:
After that, I was able to right click on them and do a search on google. Within 30 minutes I was able to get all of my drivers downloaded and installed.
Give it a spin, it will save you a ton of time when trying to find the drivers after a rebuild – and it beats tearing the machine open to read model numbers.
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Manual technique:
http://nzschooltech.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-to-find-out-what-kind-of-hardware.html