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Driver FoundHow many times have you tried to sell or reinstall a piece of hardware such as a digital camera, sound card, or other peripheral and can’t find the driver disc? Or, is your desk drawer cluttered with a wide assortment of discs that you will probably never use any time soon?

It’s time you cleaned up that clutter and consolidate your OEM software and driver discs by archiving them.

While it is true that there are a lot of sites that offer hard-to-find drivers, you should know that using them is ‘at your own risk’ and quite unofficial. Additionally, there are often trimmed-down OEM software discs that come with the hardware which you just can’t download freely (at least not legally!) from the manufacturer’s website.

Consolidate your discs!

Here’s something that I’ve started to do any time I get a new piece of hardware: Make an ISO backup of the discs that come with the hardware. If you have the drive space available, save each ISO to a folder on your drive, or, copy them onto a single DVD. That way, even if you can’t find the installation media when you decide to sell or reinstall the device later on, you can still go back and use the software that came with it.

Most driver discs hardly use the capacity of the CD that they come on, so you could feasibly fit quite a large number of them on a single 4.7Gb DVD.

How to archive to ISO?

Practically all of the major CD burning programs such as Roxio, Sonic, and Nero offer the ability to create ISO images from CD/DVD’s, but a super quick and easy way (and free!) to accomplish this is by using a tool like LC ISO Creator. Once you’ve archived them, then check out Tim’s earlier post regarding ways to read ISO files as a virtual drive letter if you need to access them later on.

…and beyond…

Of course, archiving isn’t limited to just your OEM and driver discs. If you are ambitious enough, backup the rest of your discs as well…One thing to note is that some discs (games are notorious for obvious reasons) are burned with a copy protection algorithm that makes it downright near impossible to generate an ISO backup or copy with most out-of-the-box tools.

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About the AuthorRob is a network administrator who has been in the IT field for over 14 years. He searches out free or nearly-free alternatives to expensive solutions when supporting his friends, family, or work environment. Rob maintains the blog Confessions of a freeware junkie, regularly contributes at Geeks are Sexy, and creates electronic music in his spare time as Maximillian X. Rob and his wife Lindsay are celebrating the birth of their first child, Kathryn on February 7th.
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Tim Fehlman