Boot camp driver restore!

July 20, 2020 9:44 AM

I was working on an important presentation on my MacBook Pro 14,3. Under Windows in device manager I somehow deleted the network controller. Without reinstalling Windows and no internet connection what are my options?!

I have no OS X partition. Missed a huge meeting today because of this. Everything is backed up but reinstalling Adobe CC etc will be time consuming. Basically I’m not seeing my Broadcom cars in device manager. WiFi, tethering to a phone, nothing works. The network controller shows up as not functioning so I may have mucked it up. Scanning for hardware changes, etc. doesn’t help. Everything wants to go online to fix the problem which isn’t helping. I have no system restore or rollback option for drivers. Before I go nuclear and reinstall Windows is there anyway to reset drivers to their defaults?

posted by geoff. to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Do you still see the Bootcamp installer on the windows side? That's the thing that installs many of the drivers after you boot into Windows and should work for re-installing the network driver.
posted by Betelgeuse at 9:49 AM on July 20, 2020

I'm with Betelgeuse-- the bootcamp installer on the Windows side *is* the drivers package, Windows drivers for Mac hardware. What you want is in there.
posted by Sunburnt at 9:55 AM on July 20, 2020

I do not have that! Let me install that, I was trying similar things with open source software.
posted by geoff. at 10:02 AM on July 20, 2020

Wait this requires OS X to prepare a flash drive? I do not have OSX for some reason. Is there a way around this?
posted by geoff. at 10:04 AM on July 20, 2020

If you have any access to a MacOS anywhere, you can use that to prepare a drive. If you don't, you have to get more creative. Brigadier was a way to do it, at least at one time. Not 100% sure it still works (and don't have my Bootcamp'd computer with me to try it). The problem, of course, is that it requires a network connection, so you'll have to do it on a different machine and then transfer to your target machine.
posted by Betelgeuse at 10:12 AM on July 20, 2020

This is definitely one reason I'd never be comfortable removing the Mac partition entirely, but I guess if you really don't have one that's just how it is. I hope you can figure it out.
posted by Alensin at 10:32 AM on July 20, 2020

I do have access to MacOS but it was oddly partitioned as the name "Windows" so installing the driver support pack worked. Brigadier didn't work because I didn't have any network ability (bluetooth, lan, wifi, etc.) because of some issue with the network controller driver.

Under OS X, installing the support back to a USB stick and installing it on the Windows 10 install worked. Looks like there's a lot of issues with the Windows 10 1909 update and the Broadcom adapter. For example I can't connect to 5GHZ connections. In the end I managed to get everything back to normal so thanks everyone.

Looks like I'm definitely not the only one with this issue, 5Ghz works on OS X just not on Windows which sucks.

Oddly I can get 5Ghz to work if I set the power setting in the Windows driver to 25%.

In any case this seems to be a really common problem and it appears that Bootcamp is effectively being abandoned as these issues from Google seem to go back several years with no real solution. I might just by an external Wifi adapter or buy a Surface in the future. The Windows Linux Subsystem is too much to pass up at this point.

If anyone has any ideas why the Broadcom adapter is wonky on Windows I'd be curious from an intellectual perspective. This happens across routers and given the widespread complaints on the Internet it isn't just me.
posted by geoff. at 2:16 PM on July 20, 2020

Have you run Apple Software Update in Windows? Sometimes new boot camp drivers show up there.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 4:32 PM on July 20, 2020