If you help fix people’s computers you will come across devices that windows will not have drivers for or you may be having problems downloading them from the machine manufacturer site, here is a quick way to go about it.

Go to Device Manager right click on unrecognised device there will be an exclamation mark on it click Properties ->Details and select Hardwae ID’s from the property drop down list. VID_ and VEN_ are used to identify vendors and PID_ and DEV_ identify Product ID. The HEX value following Product ID “PID_/DEV_” or Vendor ID “VID_/VEN_” is what you use in your search to identify the device.

Now go to pcidatabase.com enter your product or vendor id to such for your device.

I was trying to work on a computer the other day, it would not recognize it’s DVD drive and switching with another dvd drive did not make a difference. The error message provided was
“Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)”

To solve this Code 39 error, follow these instructions:

1) Close all open programs

2) Click on Start, Run, and type REGEDIT and press Enter

3) Click on the plus signs (+) next to the following folders

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
• SYSTEM
• CurrentControlSet
• Control
• Class
• {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

4) This folder is the DVD/CD-ROM Drive Class Description in the registry. Look for any of the following names in the right hand column.

• UpperFilters
• LowerFilters
• UpperFilters.bak
• LowerFilters.bak

5) If  any of the above keys shown in step 4 are listed, right-click on them and choose Delete
6) After deleting the keys, close the Registry Editor
7) Reboot your computer
Open My Computer and check to see if your CD or DVD drives have returned. You may also want to open Device Manager and verify that the yellow exclamation and error code on the CD or DVD drive is gone.

I got this info at this site and they even tell you other things you can do with drive errors.