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Are the various drivers for XP pro compatible with XP home edition?

Aitchbee
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Posted January 9, 2012 at 7:11PM

I will be doing a fresh install of XP home to a new hard drive, but all of the 'drivers' are on an XP pro installed hard drive which I will be replacing.After installation of XP home on the new hard drive will I be able to load the 'drivers' from the old hard drive, which will be connected as a 'slave'.

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Ian in Northampton

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Posted January 9, 2012 at 9:40PM

While the drivers for all versions of XP are, I believe, the same, you need to think hard about how you reinstall them. If you have all the drivers - in their original form - stored in a folder somewhere, you should be fine. Or: use a program like DriverMax to find and store all your drivers for you before making the change. How were you planning to get them from the slave drive to the new master drive?

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Aitchbee

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Posted January 9, 2012 at 11:38PM

Ian in Northhampton - I am thinking hard, was thinking of attaching hard drive (with all the 'drivers' on it), as slave, and pointing to it when asked for 'drivers', for the new install.Is this feesible?

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Taff™

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Posted January 10, 2012 at 8:33AM

It would take longer than downloading the drivers for your machine from the manufacturers website and transferring them to the new drive with a memory stick.

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onthelimit1

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Posted January 10, 2012 at 8:51AM

I'd go with Ian. Use the free version of drivermax It can save all the drivers to a flash drive in seconds and makes the reinstall much easier.

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Ian in Northampton

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Posted January 10, 2012 at 8:55AM

AitchBEE: it's almost certainly not that simple. You need to install the drivers - I really don't think you can just copy them across, because they need to be integrated into your new Windows installation.

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Batch

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Posted January 10, 2012 at 9:09AM

I don't know about drivermax, but some of these utils extract the drivers from an existing install and create installable driver sets. Maybe drivermax does that.

Certainly trying to install directly off another disk where the drivers are installed is fraught with issues. A normal driver install pack (for a particular piece of hardware) includes a .INF file which contains a variety of "parameter" information to tell the OS what driver files (e.g. to install and where to put them a various other info.

Also, some driver packs include software (.EXEs and .DLLs) that are designed to be installed alongside the drivers (auido and graphics are obvious examples of this).

By far the best way is to find out the motherboard details and all of the additional hardware that may have been added. Then go to the vendors website and download the latest driver packs.

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onthelimit1

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Posted January 10, 2012 at 9:24AM

Batch

Yes, drivermax does that. I've used it to reinstall drivers after an XP install and it works a treat.

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Aitchbee

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Posted January 10, 2012 at 9:39AM

Thanks everybody - I'll download Drivermax and give that a try.

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