How to Add Drivers to Recovery Media

Scenario

• Recovery medium does not boot
• Input devices are not available
• No access to RAID devices
• No access to USB 3.0 devices
• Network interface not available

Reason

This happens due to lack of drivers for the respective devices. You’re missing drivers when using one of the rescue media and want to add them.

Solution

WinPE rescue environment

There are two ways to add drivers when using the Windows PE (WinPE) rescue environment:

Option #1: Add drivers upon media creation

It’s usually advisable to get drivers from the manufacturer’s website. OEMs typically provide drivers for download in a section called Support or Downloads. Driver packages often comes as .exe files that unpack themselves into a folder including files with extensions .sys, .inf and others. Unpack them somewhere. An .inf file is the index of a driver packet. Our software needs necessarily an .inf file to implement a driver.

Alternatively, you can retrieve the drivers from within your Windows:

1. Launch Windows Device Manager (right click My Computer > Manage > Device Manager)
2. Locate the device.
3. Double click the device and open Driver > Driver Details.
4. There, you should see several .sys files with the path C:\Windows\System32\drivers\. For each of them that lists a provider other than Microsoft Corporation, write down its name.
5. Then open C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\ (you’ll need to enable display of protected system files in folder options) and search for each filename you wrote down.
6. The driver files are located inside folders. Copy the contents of each folder elsewhere.
7. Then re-create the media again while using RMB. When prompted, add the drivers by pointing the program to the folders you’ve previously copied.

Option #2:

Alternatively, you can add the drivers after booting from the recovery media. While in the express mode, open Load Drivers, navigate to where you had copied driver folder contents, and select the .inf file. Repeat this for each driver.

This option is useful for ad hoc use or for testing a driver in the WinPE environment.

The rescue environment is installed in a RAM disk. Thus it is non-permanent. After a reboot or shutdown the RAM disk is gone and so are the drivers.

Linux rescue environment

Unfortunately it is not possible to add any drivers to the Linux RCD. If this environment runs into driver issues please use the WinPE environment instead.