How to find vendor and model of unknown drivers

I reinstalled windows on a new machine and the drivers are not present for the product network card.

When in device manager all I get is the question mark and I am unable to figure out the actual name of the vendor or model of the card. This is making my search to find the correct driver hard.

Anyone know how I to find out more about the hardware that does not have drivers?

Duncan Krebs

Posted 2012-12-29T23:38:43.247

Reputation: 261

Have you found the driver? – nixda – 2013-01-08T16:54:05.390

Yeah, I did with guess downloading from samsung, but I used your advice in another driver. thanks. – Duncan Krebs – 2013-01-11T02:56:42.400

Answers

Use PCI database (online website)

go to the device manager
open the properties of the unknown device
click on details → Hardware IDs
extract the vendor ID and the device ID like shown in the screenshot
search on the PCI database for the vender and database ID.
The database is regularly updated by users. Scroll down Intel's page as an example.
The results will show a driver name which can be googled

Use Unknown Devices (portable offline tool)

The portable tool even shows old drivers which are normally only visible if you type SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1 in an elevated CMD prompt before opening the device manager.

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Use DriverIdentifier (offline tool with online database)

Install it or extract it with UniExtract if you need a portable version. It will scan your drivers and compare them with its online database.

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nixda

Posted 2012-12-29T23:38:43.247

Reputation: 23 233

My driver hardware ID shows up as ms_ndsiwanbh and is not found on the site you recommended – None – 2013-06-17T08:43:42.437

@Yvette Sorry to hear that. I already had the same issue with a laptop. What exact PC/laptop and what operating system do you use? It seems to be a WAN miniport network driver – nixda – 2013-06-17T10:35:56.890

Samsung 64 bit i7 - windows 8 pro thnx Nixda – None – 2013-06-17T10:37:58.757

@Yvette I guess you mean a Samsung laptop. You need the exact model number. Something like "Samsung Series 9 NP900X3A-A02US". Have you tried all recommended network drivers from their support page?

– nixda – 2013-06-17T10:58:20.530

thnx for yr help nixda where would i find the model number (apart from on the bottom of the laptop- which I can't read) thnx – None – 2013-06-17T11:33:34.170

I needed the sound and video drivers for a unknown motherboard of a computer I was fixing and I found a solution here: http://www.kmbytes.com/blog/2014/07/23/how-to-check-motherboard-drivers/

It is a little program that has to be installed and couple of button clicks. Worked like a charm for me. Cheers!

Danny

Posted 2012-12-29T23:38:43.247

Reputation: 1