How to Export Drivers Using Powershell in Windows 8.1 U1

In Windows 8.1 Update 1 there appeared a new Powershell cmdlet Export-WindowsDriver, that allows to export all the installed third-party drivers (non-Microsoft ones) directly from the Driver Store. The news is excellent, since earlier to export and backup the drivers, you had to use third-party apps, like DoubleDriver, DriverMax, etc.

So, to export all the installed third-party drivers in Windows 8.1, run the Powershell console under the administrator privileges and enter the following command:

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Export-WindowsDriver –Online -Destination c:\export-drivers

If you have to export drivers from the offline Windows image mounted, for instance, to c:\win8_image, the command looks like this:

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Export-WindowsDriver -Path c:\win8_image -Destination c:\export-drivers

After you run the cmdlet, the data on the exported drivers that are not a part of the system will be displayed on the screen.

When the export is over, some folders with the name of the corresponding INF files of the drivers appear in the specified folder.

Each folder contains all the files necessary to install a driver in the system (the tool creates the list of files according to the description in the INF file of the driver).

To display the list of all exported drivers in a convenient form with the indication of the class, vendor and the driver version, let’s export the drivers with the two commands:

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$BackupDrivers = Export-WindowsDriver -Online -Destination c:\export-drivers

After that let the results be displayed in the table:

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$BackupDrivers | Select-Object ClassName, ProviderName, Date, Version | Sort-Object ClassName

The drivers from this archive can be distributed to other systems either manually or automatically with DISM, PowerShell, MDT, SCCM, etc.

So, today we have learned a new cmdlet Export-WindowsDriver in Windows 8.1 Update 1, that allows to export all third-party drivers installed in the system into a separate folder.