Installing drivers problems

[coatesville]

In the family their are two computers which I built myself and both seem to have the same multimedia and internet drivers althought one was bought later than the other one of them which I built last Jan was AMD Duran 1000+cpu motherboard was integrated with sound card,10\100 NIC card 128mb of ram .
The last one was an AMD Duron 1200+Cpu Motherboard with integrated sound 3D Video 56kmodel 10/100NIC Card 128mb Ram.
Both of these have the same disk for the motherboard that is they both use the same sound video and NIC Card drivers which are sis drivers.
My question is recently they both had to be formatted becaue of viruses and when I go to install the drivers it only will install one driver at a time and I have to keep going in to do a setup and it takes ages to get them all installed as it sometimes skips over them and than I can`t get them to install it starts all over again.
Here is my question do I have to install them on the hard drive in windows first than when it finds the hardware do I just point to the place they were installed or can I just do setup.
When id do the auto setup after it starts it has a box that comes up which says OS than a blank am I supposed to put where I want to install it in that I was just deleting that.
Hope you can understand what I am talking about and can give me an answer.
Also I hope I put this in the right forum was hard to know whether it should have been in this one or in windows.

[Sylvander]

You said “it only will install one driver at a time and I have to keep going in to do a setup and it takes ages to get them all installed as it sometimes skips over them and than I can`t get them to install it starts all over again.”
QUESTIONS
1. After you install a driver does Windows FORCE you to restart or do you choose to.
2. This “setup” you are forced to do. Is it Windows Setup or what?
3. Could you give more detail or be more explicit about the steps.
4. What do you mean by “it sometimes skips over them”? Was the “.inf” file not found?
5. Which version of Windows do you have?

Here’s what’s happening.
1. You have the hardware in place.
2. The BIOS detects the hardware.
3. When you install Windows it is told about the hardware by the BIOS and during “Setup.exe” installing windows it “Initialises” and “Configures” the hardware and provides suitable “Resources” [IRQ’s etc].
But [with the exception of the drivers which Windows has on the installation disk] there are some items of hardware with no driver files or settings in the registry to make them work.
So during the first Windows boot it detects that these items have no registry settings and asks for the “drivers”.
You then need to point windows at, or indicate, the “.inf” [information] file which tells windows what the settings are and where to put them.
[“Find” “*.inf” (all “.inf” files) on your drivers CD, which will give a clue of where each “.inf” file is.]
Alternatively, tell Windows to search the disc for suitable drivers.
This will put the necessary files in their appointed place and put the necessary settings in their correct places in the registry so the driver files will work.
4. Repeat this as necessary.

WHERE DRIVERS FIT IN
When you want something done you tell the application, the application tells windows, Windows tells the driver [which is where the registry settings and files come in], the driver tells the BIOS and the BIOS tells the hardware.
If all those linkages are complete [plus some other things], the job gets done.