WINXP - Backup Your System's Drivers

Ever had a hard time with drivers, especially on Laptops? Well I found a nice tool for backing up drivers. DriverBackup (donationware).

It is so good we use it at work to backup drivers on systems we send to customers. We keep a copy if needed for warranty repairs.

This is a screenshot for my DELL Desktop at work.


DriveBackup Main Window
(click for larger view)

DriverBackup can be run directly from a CD, install not required.

Features:

• Driver Backup & Restore (uses the .bki file it creates)


• Makes a tree (as shown in screenshot) for each driver with a copy of the driver files


• You can have the option to have a copy of DriverBackup program files included

I have DriverBackup make the backup to a temporary folder C:\Temp, then write the contents to a CD.

Note that with the tree-copy of drivers, and you have SATA hard drives, you can copy the contents of the SATA driver folder to a USB Flash Drive and load these when you need to boot to your WinXP Setup CD (which does not have SATA drivers) so the CD can see your hard drive without problems. Note that loading extra drivers is done when the CD first loads, there is a message on the bottom Statusbar about loading extra drivers.