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.

Do you have a system backup image ???
If you can not recover existing partitions,
then you will need to do a clean install
unless you have a backup that you can apply...

With Retrospect your up a creek...

I used Kyhi's Rescue disk

You do not need a video driver if you are using this boot disk. It comes pre-configured. with it's own video driver.
If it's not working, then you need to rebuild your Windows PE Kyhi's Rescue disk.
And start again.

If he was using My Media to visually see that the OS was unreadable - then the retrospect media is useless...
As it is just a simple command based GUI

spunk said:

You do not need a video driver if you are using this boot disk. It comes pre-configured. with it's own video driver.
If it's not working, then you need to rebuild your Windows PE Kyhi's Rescue disk.
And start again.

Guys,

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear.

I used Kyhi's disk to run the Aeomi partition manager, to inspect the partitions on the laptop SSD. This disk is totally separate from the recovery disk generated by the Retrospect software. Retrospect uses the Windows Assessment and Deployment toolkit to get the base Win PE code, and then they add their own code to create their recovery disk. Obviously Kyhi did a better job than the Retrospect people in incorporating screen drivers.

The issue is that the Retrospect recovery disk has windows that are too tall to be displayed 100% on the laptop. Here is what I mean. This first photo shows the Recovery disk Welcom window, on my desktop system. Notice that the NEXT and FINISH buttons are clearly visible at the bottom of the window. Sorry for the crude images. I used my phone camera for these screenshots.:



This next image shows that same Welcome window on my laptop. Because the Retrospect recovery disk doesn't have a driver for my laptop, the window is simply too tall for the display. If I use my mouse to "bounce" the window up, I can momentarily see those same buttons, but I can't get the mouse to click on the NEXT button.



So that in a nutshell is the issue. Retrospect says I need to install a proper driver for the laptop into their recovery disk, but I simply don't know which file is the core video driver. As I mentioned in my initial posting, the laptop needs a Vidia display driver.

Is there some way that I can identify the Retrospect-specific programs that they added to a base Win PE install, and then transfer those same files to Kyhi's Rescue Disk? Or can I pull the driver I need out of Kyhi's Rescue Disk?

I feel like about 99% of the way to a solution, but it's this last 1% that is killing me.

So what are you wanting to use the "Retrospect Recovery Disk" to do ???
What you are asking is how do you customize your "Retrospect Recovery Disk" prior to media creation...
According to their How-To you need to create a driver folder and copy drivers into it..

Any drivers or packages (i.e. package.cab) that you would like to add to the ISO image should be placed in the following directory before creating the ISO image.
<retrospect application>/drsupp/drivers

The method I use to get those system drivers is via the dism cmd -->

Code:

Dism /online /Export-Driver /Destination:[path]

Or can I pull the driver I need out of Kyhi's Rescue Disk?

Media uses the --> MS Basic Display Driver
Which is not included in WinPE

Again, to me you are trying to reinvent the modern wheel using cave tools....

See if you can put your pointer on one of the corners that you can see, and if it turns into a double sided arrow, pull it inwards to resize the window so you can view everything. Also, make sure the image was made with Retrospect 16.5 the latest.

spunk said:

See if you can put your pointer on one of the corners that you can see, and if it turns into a double sided arrow, pull it inwards to resize the window so you can view everything. Also, make sure the image was made with Retrospect 16.5 the latest.

Spunk. I did use Retrospect 16.5 to create the recovery media, and I just booted up my problem laptop. No joy. Positioning the mouse on one of the corners doesn't change the pointer shape. Same if I position the pointer on one of the edges. That window is definitely not resizeable.