Drivers! Help!

[cavola]

Hi,

Before formatting my hard drive i made note of the locations of all the drivers in device manager.

Thus i backed up the folders containing the driver locations. Typically /windows/system and /windows/system32 etc...

However i have since formatted the hard drive and reinstalled windows 98. I have three unknown devices and when searching for a driver they wont recognise anything from the backed up folders!

Please help. For example i know i have the correct drivers *.sys but the device driver thing wont acknowledge it.

What am i doing wrong?

[edfair]

The usual driver installation routine uses an *.inf file to point to the correct drivers. So if you are missing the *.inf that matches the hardware you may need to download the entire install set from wherever.
Or possibly let them install with the wrong drivers and then change drivers later.
Sometimes gets to be a pain, so have faith that you can really do it.

[tacoeater]

I see this is your first post. Welcome to the forum. What we need from you in order to help is some data and specific device names. did you write down the names of the devices (brand, model, etc) when you were doing all that work?
usually you need video, sound, perhaps modem and network drivers. what is your computer brand and model. if you have a major brand computer you can search for those drivers on the manufacturer's website by model number or sometimes by serial number from the back of the computer.
give us some details and perhaps we can steer you in the right direction.

[edrod13]

Here is a similar post and ANDY has posted a link to a freeware proggy that will tell you what the unknown devices are. Once the proggy tells you what hardware they pertain to, go out and get the drivers online.

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?threadid=101154&highlight=unknown+device

[cavola]

Thanks for all the help everyone. Much appreciated.