completely delete a driver

[chriskmee]

Ok, so after installing some dvd writer program on my dads computer, the dvd drive stopped being recognized. Its been a few years and the problem still persists. If i could go back in time i would just do a system restore, but i cant. Under driver details there are about 5 drivers listed, some of them are not digitally signed and i believe one of those are the problem. i think that one of the programs installed a bad driver and stopped it from working. Its still recognized in device manager, but not My computer.

So here is the question: a simple uninstall driver from device manager does absolutely nothing, i want to remove one driver at a time, or even remove them all and tell Windows to download a new one. attached is a screen of my computer as an example, this is not the broken computer, just an example to help explain what i want. Basically what would i have to do to remove that second driver, the GEAR one, assuming it was a bad driver and just clicking uninstall from device manager did nothing.

Thanks for the help, I will upload a picture of my dad's computer drivers if it would help, but i couldn't do it at the time of this post.

 

[johnb35]

If your using Vista, I believe you can uninstall the driver along with the software. When you go to uninstall the driver, there should be an option below it where it asks if you want to lelete the software for it as well.

 

[chriskmee]

I'm currently using Win7 64bit RC and my dad is using XP 32bit. I couldn't find this option on my system, haven't looked at his yet

 

[chriskmee]

bump

 

[johnb35]

As far as XP goes, you would have to uninstall the software part of it in add/remove programs, might have to do that as well in Windows 7. But I know for a fact that in Vista, you can uninstall the software when you uninstall the device in device manager.

 

[chriskmee]

ill try that, i thought i uninstalled the software already and it didn't delete the driver, but ill look into it. if uninstalling the program doesn't work, can i just go to its location and simply delete it? Like in my example, just go to C:\Windows\system32\drivers and delete GEARAspiWDM.sys, or would that be a bad idea?

 

[johnb35]

There would other driver files besides that one. Best bet would be to uninstall the whole package if its in add/remove programs and then reboot.