backup drivers from Windows installation USB stick

sbpetrack · 27 Apr 2019

I am in the middle of a horrible INACCESIBLE BOOT DEVICE BSOD, and the only good copies I seem to have of drivers I need are the ones from the windows usb installation flash drive. But the response to your command above is:

."Dism does not support servicing Windows PE with the /Online option." from Backup and Restore Device Drivers in Windows 10 | Tutorials

What is the Dism command to "backup" the drivers out of a Windows installation USB stick into some directory please?

Thank you

NavyLCDR · 27 Apr 2019

You can't backup the drivers for a Windows installation USB stick. When you install Windows from it, the drivers get installed as well.

Kyhi · 27 Apr 2019

If you boot into winpe - you can export the system driver from an offline image....
dism.exe /Image:C:\ /Export-Driver /Destination:U:\drivers

C being host OS Offline Image drive letter
U being USB drive letter

sbpetrack · 01 May 2019

Thank you to both of you. I can see that I haven been clear about what I think my problem is, and what I would like to do about it. Please let me try again:

My problem is that my System either continuously boot loops (meaning that I get to the Great White Circle of Spinning Dots; it spins for some time; then it stops spinning and freezes for a moment; and then the computer restarts and the pattern repeats itself, endlessly); or instead I get an ÏNACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE bsod. ( The first situation happens when i boot the machine normally; the second situation happens when I take that same machine, boot into (arch) Linux, run Oracle VirtualBox, and then boot the Windows partitions on the machine, configured as "raw disks" on the VM).

I **think** that what happened is that some driver required for disk access was updated into uselessness (I say this even though I was able to roll back recent updates via Dism.) What I want to do is simply replace a few drivers that I fear might be corrupt with known good ones. I'd like to do ONLY that, not completely overwrite my current installation and lose everything. So I can boot into WInPE from an installation USB stick. BUt I only want to replace just one single driver on my current installation with the known 'good' driver from the installation USB.

Can I just copy the driver file from the running WinPE stick, and use that file to replace the eponymous file inside D:\Windows\SYstem32\drivers, then remove the USB stick and reboot into windows? I assumed that I couldn't do this because of signature/security issues. But perhaps I can. If not, I was looking for the "correct" way to extract one single driver file from the Windows USB installation stick and then to install that one file into my desktop ?

Thanks for any help