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How to find Drivers for unknown device

How to find Drivers for unknown device

When we buy any hardware the drivers come along with it on a disc. If the driver disc is lose we always look for device driver from the manufacturers website. But what if we are not sure of the manufacturer of the hardware? I myself use Lavalys Everest (and alike) to identify the unknown device, but what if those software is not available at hand? This is quite a situation that make this excellent trick come in handy.

Note that every device has a vendor and Device id associated with it. If you can find this ID, you can find the manufacturer. To find Vendor and device id in windows is not that hard just follow this steps

   1. Open Device Manager (Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager)
   2. The hardware whose drivers are missing will appear as Unknown device, so its easier to locate the 
       device.
   3. Right click on the unknown device and click on Properties.
   4. Under the Properties window click on Details tab and select Device Instance Id from the drop
       down box.

   5. You should see a code similar to this

        PCIVEN_10EC&DEV_8139&SUBSYS_813910EC&REV_104&DC268A3&0&3880

   6. The portion of the code highlighted in RED is the Vendor ID and the portion highlighted in GREEN is
       the Device ID. In this example:

            Vendor ID = 10EC
            Device ID = 8139

   7. Once you have obtained both the IDs, proceed to PCI Database. There you can either search for the
       vendor from the vendor ID or directly get information about the device along with the vendor name by
       searching with the device ID.

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