PCI Database Find Those Missing Drivers

It is a typical scenario. You are prepping a system for imaging, or reformatted a system, you don’t have the drivers disk and you have that one pesky piece of hardware that you just cant seem to find a driver for.

A missing Decive in Windows

A missing Device in Windows

There are plenty of sites to find drivers, the best being your systems manufactures website, secondly the website for the manufacturer of the component missing; but how do you know what driver you need? You need to identify what exactly that “Unknown Device” is before you can start poking around to find the driver for it. There are many applications on the internet that you can download that will supposedly tell you what driver you need, and go download it, but they typically come packaged with unwanted software or in some cases malware.
Using what your system already knows about the hardware, and a few online resources, you can easily find what the “Unknown Device” is referring to without cluttering up your system with unwanted software. All PCI devices are assigned a Vendor ID, and a Hardware ID. The vendor ID identifies what company manufactured that device. The Hardware ID uniquely identifies the model of that vendors device. Using these two key pieces of data, we can quickly identify what driver is needed.
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- First, access the device manager, and view the properties of the unknown device.

- Next, click on the details tab of the missing device

- Select Hardware IDs from the drop down. We will use the screen shot below to analyze what exactly we are looking at.
Hardware and Vendor ID's

Hardware and Vendor ID's



In this string of data, we are only concerned with to key pieces of information. The data contained in Red is the Vendor ID. This always starts with VEN_. The data contained in green is the Device ID which always starts with DEV_. Now that we know how to find these peices of information, lets put them to use.
- Open a web browser and visit http://www.pcidatabase.com/. This is an online resource containing every PCI device that is manufactured.

- Enter your device ID, without the DEV_ into the Device Search field and press search. Note that we could search the Vendor ID, but that would only tell us who manufactured the device. We need the model so that we can find the appropriate driver for it.

- The device model will be displayed.
Vendor Search Result

Vendor Search Result
From here we can see that the “Unknown Device” in my case was the SoundMax Integrated Digital Audio driver. You can see it also gives us the vendor ID which matches the data found in red in the above screen shot. Armed with the knowledge of your missing device, you can visit your system manufactures driver download area and find the appropriate driver for your OS.

Posted in: Devices,Drivers,Problem,Unknown