Free Device Driver Backup and Extraction Utilities

Free Device Driver Backup and Extraction Utilities
The software on this page enable you to copy / backup / extract the device drivers for your Windows system in a form so that you can use them to reinstall your system. This is useful for situations when you have lost your device drivers CD or when you have bought a computer that came with a preloaded system and no device drivers CD. The utilities here allow you to backup your device drivers (particularly the third party drivers, that is, those that did not come from Microsoft) and package them in a form that you can use to load in a Windows system (after, say, you have reinstalled Windows).
This page only lists free drivers backup tools. It does not list commercial tools like Driver Magician which usually have additional convenience features like the ability to create a self-installing executable that installs all your drivers in one fell swoop (convenient when reinstalling your system) and updating all your drivers to the latest version.
If you have already installed a new system and do not have drivers for it, either try searching for the drivers in a regular search engine (if you know the brand name and model of the device) or use a commercial software like Driver Detective which not only gets you the latest versions of all your drivers, but also helps you keep it up to date.
Free Device Drivers Backup and Extracting Software
DriverBackup!
DriverBackup! copies the installed drivers in your Windows system and recreates the INF files needed so that they can be reinstalled in Windows in the future. It extracts both Microsoft and non-Microsoft drivers. The software is released under the GNU General Public License, which means it is both free and open source. Note that the drivers are packed in a RAR archive format. You may need to get one of the Free File Archivers and File Compression Utilities to extract them (if you don't already have one). In addition, it requires the MSCOMCTL.OCX to be installed on your system. If you get an error message asking for MSCOMCTL.OCX, search for it with Google - it is freely available in many places (it's a redistributable component of Visual Basic from Microsoft that programmers ship with their programs).
DriverMax
DriverMax extracts the installed drivers in your Windows system and copies them along with the INF files so that they can be reinstalled in the future when needed (such as when you install Windows again). All Microsoft and non-Microsoft drivers can be exported by the software; you can select which driver you wish to copy / backup, or all of them, if you wish