Univsersal Restore and Drivers
I finally got the universal restore down without making my computer go into repair mode, but had a question about what the universal restore is supposed to load regarding drivers.
When I boot to universal restore, I point to the folder that has all of the drivers for the particular computer. In this case it's a Dell 5410 Latitude. When it boots up after the universal restore, windows loads a bunch of drivers and then asks for a reboot. After that I am still missing drivers in device manager.
My question is what is the universal restore supposed to load? Does it just load the minimum drivers needed to boot the computer safely or is it supposed to load all drivers for each hardware device installed on the sytsem. I attached an image of what my device manager looks like after. Some devices are installed and recognized, but windows says it doesn't have any drivers installed for them.
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FYI, I generally use UR to generalize hardware and boot it "as is" with missing drivers... unless it won't boot because of the need for a special RAID controller. In most cases though, running Universal Restore without adding any drivers will result in a bootable windows system. At that point, you would then need to manually isntall all missing drivers use the drivers from the manufacturer. I'd recommend downloading them first so you have the available already. Some manufacturers, like Dell, have full driver .cab packs with all the drivers on the system and can easily be used to manually install the drivers after running UR.
In your case, you're in Windows so you're past the hard part. You just need to find your drivers from the manufacturer and manually install them. Unfortunately, without a functioning network controller, you may not have Internet access to download them, so you may need to find another method to grab those before running UR or if you have another system to use in the meantime.
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Thanks. It sounds like my assumption was right, that Universal REstore only finds and loads drivers necessary to boot the device. I downloaded all of the drivers and extracted them to the same location, then pointed univseral restore to them.
THanks
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