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Need nVidia driver for laptop that needs recovery media restore - how?
I need to locate the core video display driver for a Windows laptop where the partition got trashed, for use with backup software recovery media. (I used Kyhi's Rescue disk to verify that the Windows partition is not readable.)
My Lenovo T560 laptop somehow lost both the System Reserved partition and the C drive with Windows installed. (It also lost a second "scratch and test" Windows partition that I use with multi-booting.)
There is a display issue with the recovery media bootable USB for my backup software that was generated using Win PE, so the backup vendor's tech support person wrote:
Agent Response:
This issue you are seeing with the Video display could be related to the video drivers available while booted from the recovery disk. The recovery disk is based a very simple Microsoft WinPE environment that uses pretty generic drivers.
You can try to include your own specific video drivers with the bootable recovery environment to see if that helps. Details on the driver locations when creating a recovery disk can be found at:
Retrospect: Windows User's Guide > Disaster Recovery
Their documentation says to extract all needed drivers from a driver repository. But since my target system is busted, I can't do that. So I downloaded the graphics driver update from the Lenovo site,
Then I ran the exe to extract all the files. Wowzers, nVidia has a crapton of driver update files, 2 GB total.
I have no idea where to start to extract just the core video display driver. Is the core vidio display driver the *.sys file here:
Did I mention that some of the dll files are actually compressed?
Since my desktop system uses an nVidia GeForce GT 660 card (soon to be upgraded), can I use the video driver from my desktop?
Or is there some other approach that would get me to my answer faster? I am completely, completely flummoxed here.
One final question: If I want this backup software recovery bootable USB to work for all my systems, should I build that recovery USB with video drivers for all my systems? Is Win PE smart enough to only load a video driver for a specific system and ignore other video drivers? I think I am going to learn a lot about about Windows driver architecture.