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How to Uninstall a Driver From WinRE Command Prompt?

Anonymous
2023-01-24T00:30:45+00:00

Hello.

For the entirety of this last week I have been experiencing great difficulty with my computer, leading to BSODs. To fix this, I had gotten a new SSD, as I thought it was a Windows update that killed my old HDD. I have already initialized the SSD, installed Windows10, and I was installing drivers on the system for my peripherals.

I have a ASUS WLAN PCE-68 5GHz WiFi adapter that I knew also needed a driver installed, so I went through the process of installing it from the official ASUS site, and all of a sudden I experienced a sudden BSOD. The very same BSOD I have been experiencing all week.

This leads me to believe that my error is being caused by this shoddy, half-baked driver from ASUS. Is there a way I can uninstall this driver using WinRE's command prompt? I have tried going through dism, but I do not have any image created already to do so.

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Devices and drivers

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-01-24T01:06:23+00:00

    Hi, I’m Nicole, I’ll be happy to help you out today.

    You can uninstall a driver from the Windows RE (Recovery Environment) command prompt by using the following steps:

    Boot your computer into Windows RE by pressing the appropriate key during startup (usually F8 or F11).

    Once in Windows RE, click on "Troubleshoot" and then "Command Prompt."

    In the command prompt, type the following command and press Enter: "pnputil -e" This command will list all of the drivers currently installed on your system.

    Find the driver that you want to uninstall in the list and make note of its .inf file name.

    Type the following command and press Enter: "pnputil -f -d oemXX.inf" (replace "XX" with the number of the inf file that you want to uninstall)

    Restart your computer to complete the uninstallation process.

    You can also use the system restore option in the recovery environment to revert back to a restore point dated before the installation of the said driver.

    Report back the results here afterward.

    Thank you.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-04-12T03:31:10+00:00

    Unfortunately windows is already stuck in a boot loop, else I wouldn't be resorting to using comand prompt anyway

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  3. Ramesh 176.1K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2023-04-12T02:41:30+00:00

    John,

    Try to start Windows in Safe mode, which loads a minimal set of drivers. From there, you can add/remove drivers as required.

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-04-11T21:51:01+00:00

    Hi Nicole, I am in the same conundrum as Forsake and I just tried doing pnputil -e as you instructed here. However the list of drivers is really long and I'm not able to scroll up to find a portion of the list. Is there anything I can do?

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  5. Anonymous
    2023-01-24T11:40:17+00:00

    Hello, Nicole.

    I have executed the command and it says "No published driver packages were found on the system." It looks like I'll have to go back to the drawing board to figure out the cause of this.

    Although, it begs to raise the question, isn't Windows 10 supposed to have some base published drivers installed on the system? Would the fact that there are no drivers showing up be the issue?

    Just for clarity because I didn't include it in my opening post, the BSOD message I get is SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED.

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