Finding the Right Driver for an Unknown Device
If you’ve ever installed Microsoft Windows on a PC, chances are you’ve seen it in your Device Manager: the dreaded “Unknown Device” item. What do you do to help Windows “know” what that device is? For that matter, how can YOU know what it is? Let’s take a look.
The “Plug and Play” architecture used on most modern Windows PCs makes it possible for Windows to recognize potentially millions of different devices and automatically load the correct drivers to make them work. Unfortunately, it’s not a perfect system. If Windows itself doesn’t contain the correct driver for a device it has identified, and if there isn’t a suitable driver somewhere on your system, that device will often show up in your Device Manager as an “Unknown Device”.
The first thing you should try when confronted with such a device is to locate all the driver discs that you have for the hardware in your system. Then, open the Device Manager, right-click on the “Unknown” device and select “Update Driver” from the context menu. Point Windows at the various driver discs you have and see if one of them recognizes this particular hardware. If you’re lucky, you’ll find the right driver, the device will be recognized, and you’ll be finished. But what if that doesn’t work? How are you supposed to know what this mystical device is if even Windows XP can’t figure it out?
The answer is to get Windows (and the Internet) to help you. To do that, bring up the Device Manager, right-click the Unknown Device, and choose “Properties” from the context menu. Under the “Details” tab you should find a string that looks something like this:
While that may not mean a lot to you, it’s at least part of the information that Windows XP’s Plug and Play feature uses to identify this device and pair it up with its correct drivers. What does this long-winded string mean?
The “PCI” part tells us that whatever this device is, it’s connected to the system through the “PCI” bus. So it’s POSSIBLE, but not definite, that this device (whatever it is) is installed in one of the PCI slots on the system. However, a number of devices built into the PC’s motherboard are also “PCI” devices and aren’t installed in an actual PCI slot, so this doesn’t tell us much.
The “VEN_14E4″ tells us the vendor or manufacturer of this device. A quick Google search reveals a plethora of different information, some of which implies that the manufacturer of this device could be “Broadcom”.
The “DEV_1677″ tells Windows (and us) that this is a specific device made by Broadcom that is internally referred to as number “1677″. If we do a quick Google search on “VEN_14E4&DEV_1677″, one of the results we get is an INF file for a Broadcom network adapter. A quick find within that page locates the following line:
%BCM5750% = BCM5750.Inst, PCI\VEN_14e4&DEV_1677&REV_00
At this point, we can probably very comfortably suspect that this “Unknown Device” is a Broadcom network adapter whose model number contains “5750″. By visiting their site (www.broadcom.com) , we find that indeed Broadcom makes an Ethernet NIC (Network Interface Card) with a model number “BCM57xx” (the “xx” means that it could be 5700, 5701, 5723, etc., anything starting with “57″). We download this driver and attempt to install it. Windows XP now identifies the device and loads the drivers. It’s not “unknown” anymore!
This same process will work for pretty much any device on your system.