Windows XP help - Gather Drivers

OGER wrote:

Is there an app that will copy all Windows drivers to a folder ?

Why ? If I want to totally clean a PC C: Drive and load Windows back on
the drive making a free install, I would like to reuse the working
drivers that I probably will not be able to find on the web.

But having the driver *file* won't "install" it into the registry.
Windows might register the driver file when you scan for drivers for
some hardware but that assumes that registration of only the driver file
is sufficient for full functionality of the hardware and that Windows
will recognize the driver when you point at its file and that you will
know to which one to point when telling Windows to use for the hardware.
While Windows might register a driver that you point at its file, that
may not give you the full features of the hardware. There may be an
..inf file that defines further functions or ancilliary software to use
with the hardware; e.g., installing and registering a driver for a
scanner won't give you the software that came with the scanner.
Software that backs up the driver files does not also store all the
driver's registry entries into .reg files.

Make sure you locate (and perhaps duplicate) all the installers for the
drivers for your current hardware and each one for each version or range
of Windows to which you may revert to using. Trying to get them later
may be too late since manufacturers discontinue products and will
eventually also discontinue providing the drivers for their unsupported
products.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEzPTOEpNUg

You don't have to enter PowerShell and then enter an internal command
for it to run each time you want to backup ONLY the driver files. You
could specify the operation on the command line you use to invoke
PowerShell, as in:

powershell.exe -command

Note that this exports (saves) all the 3rd-party drivers, not those
embedded within Windows (which should get used when Device Manager does
a scan for new hardware after a fresh install of Windows provided you
install the same version of Windows with the same set of embedded
drivers).

Although the above Youtube video and even Microsoft's own article at
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/pow...?view=win10-ps
claim that the Export-WindowsDriver cmdlet exists, nope, it doesn't on
Windows 7. That cmdlet requires a later version of PowerShell than you
can get on Windows 7. That cmdlet is available in Windows 10. Per
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/...=wps.630).aspx,
the Export-WindowsDriver cmdlet didn't exist until Windows 8.1.

You'll need a software tool, like DoubleDriver (www.boozet.org/dd.htm)
that the Youtube author mentions. The author's site says his tool
support both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Vista, and 7. Some
tools are 32-bit only (e.g., it took years before the free version of
Revo Uninstaller supported 64-bit) the result of which is that the tool
won't know about the registry redirection for 32-bit registry entries
and end up only accessing a portion of the registry. Alas, this author
has not maintained his web site to reflect where his software is
currently hosted (aka mirrored), so his download links are useless.
Found it at https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/det...le_driver.html
where both download links gave me a portable (non-installable) version
of Double Driver 4.10. It has not been updated since about August 2010.

There are alternatives to Double Driver. Some are free, some are
payware. You didn't mention price criteria. DriverBackup! is free and
open source (sourceforge.net/projects/drvback/), last updated Aug 2016.
Searching on "double driver alternative" can find some alternatives.
I've not used these tools. I save image backups: one after a fresh
install of an OS, another after fully updating it at that time, and
periodic backups during the lifetime of the OS to get me back to a prior
state of the partition(s). I also keep all the installers for the
drivers: they're stored in a Download folder (along with all other
downloaded software) that gets backed up to multiple local storage media
(an internal HDD for fast and easy access, CDs, and flash drives) and
synchronized to cloud storage, too.