How to back up drivers?

Is there a way to back up the drivers from an XP installation?
It is effective and easy to back up data, format the drive and install XP but always difficult to find some of the drivers. I tried a backup script (from ZDnet I think) - it backed up a LOT of files but the ones I needed could not be found in the backup.

Do commercial driver backup programs work well?

Where are drivers stored in a Windows system? The Windows\drivers folder on my system is empty. What is that about? The Windows\system32\drivers folder has lots of .sys and .dll files. Are those ALL of the drivers?

Is it necessary to have the installation program for each driver, or can the driver file itself be "installed" manually?

http://www.innovative-sol.com/drivermax/

http://download.cnet.com/Driver-Backup/3000-2242_4-10694017.html

http://www.drivermagician.com/

I just keep a copy of all drivers and programs...that I have ever installed on any system...in a file called Programs/Drivers...which I have as a permanent backup file on each cloned O/S partition. I've got tons of hard drives not doing anything significant and they are perfect for cloned O/S partitions and such.

So I always have the drivers/programs I've ever used...I go through and delete the ones which will never be used again about every 3 months or so.

Louis

I just keep a copy of all drivers

I do this when adding a device and driver. These are usually a set of files with a program that installs the driver.
How do I acquire such a set of files for devices that came with the computer originally? Dell offers a download for most, but not all such drivers. HP not so much.

I previously tried a couple of those driver backup programs with little success. I can't remember which ones.
Just tried the one from Cnet, http://download.cnet.com/Driver-Backup/3000-2242_4-10694017.html. It produced some very nice looking files complete with .inf or .exe installation files. Looks good! Thank you.

It's so much faster to restore an image of the system with all drivers, updates and applications, than to re-install XP and all the rest, that's the approach I prefer myself.

Edited by Platypus, 01 March 2011 - 07:47 PM.