How To Recover Uninstalled Drivers In Windows 11/10

A device driver is a utility that tells your operating system and other applications, how to use a piece of hardware. Your computer’s Bluetooth, mouse, keyboard, headphones, and every piece of hardware has a specific driver. But, what if you accidentally deleted a driver? You might wonder, “Why would I do that?” 

Let’s say, you were facing issues with your sound card, to tackle the issue, you decided to delete the drivers related to it. However, you accidentally deleted the wrong drivers. Or, let’s assume, your computer crashed and you lost a bunch of important drivers because of which your device is not functioning the way it should. 

How would you now recover deleted drivers on your Windows PC? Sounds like an impossible situation, isn’t it? How about we tell you, there’s hope. Read on as we discuss some of the best ways you can restore deleted drivers on your Windows PC.

How To Recover Deleted/ Uninstalled Drivers In Windows 10, 11

1. Manually Look For The Missing Driver

Even though you may have deleted the driver, you would still see a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark in the device category. You can use the device manager to restore the missing driver – 

1. Open the Run dialog box by pressing Windows + R and press Enter. 
2. Type devmgmt.msc and press Enter. 
3. Locate the device category with a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark and right-click on it. 
4. Right-click on it and click on Update Drivers.
   
   
5. Select Search automatically for drivers and follow on-screen instructions. 

2. Use A Third-Party Tool To Backup Drivers

This is more of a preventive measure that can help you recover deleted drivers. As a prudent user, before you delete or update drivers or even before performing operations such as reinstalling your operating system, consider backing up your drivers. The easiest way to do that is to use a driver updater tool. One such program is Advanced Driver Updater. It can also help you with the task of updating drivers as well. 

Here is how you can back up drivers using Advanced Driver Updater:

1. Download, run, and install Advanced Driver Updater
2. Click on the Backup tab 
3. Select whether you want to take a complete backup of system drivers or specific drivers. 
4. For example, let’s take a backup of camera drivers. To do that, click on the radio button next to Create the backup of the specific drivers. 
5. Click on Next. 
6. Click on the checkbox next to the device. In our case it is Cameras
   
   
7. Click on Next. In a while, a backup will be created

How Do You Access This Backup?

1. Head to the Restore tab.
   
   
2. Locate the backup and select it. 
3. Click on the Load Backup. 
4. If you wish to know the location of downloaded drivers, click on the Settings tab. Here you can even change the location of the drivers. 

3. Use A Data Recovery Tool

There are many data recovery tools out there that can help you recover accidentally lost data across a variety of file formats. Tenorshare 4DDiG, for instance, is a data recovery utility that can help you recover system files such as drivers, configuration items, etc. To do that – 

1. Download, install, and run the Tenorshare 4DDiG data recovery tool. 
2. Since drivers are mostly located in the C: driver, select Windows (C:)
   
   
3. Select the type of file. Here we will select System File.
   
   
4. Locate your missing driver and click on Recover. 

4. Rollback Drivers

If your current version of the driver is creating issues, Windows has an inbuilt functionality using which you can roll back your driver to a previous version when you know it was working fine. You can do this with the help of the Device Manager

Here are the steps –

1. Press Windows + X and select Device Manager.
   
   
2. Select your device category and double-click on it. 
3. When the Properties Window opens, click on the Driver tab. 
4. Click on Roll Back Driver.
   
   

Wrapping Up

Do let us know if you were able to successfully recover deleted drivers on your Windows PC. For more such content, keep reading WeTheGeek. You can also find us on Facebook, YouTube, Flipboard, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram.