How it started

I bought a new laptop HP OmniBook with AMD AI 365. I chose this particular model mainly because I planned to use it as my second monitor while working. That means the screen content might not change for a while. This laptop was one of very few with the new CPU’s that still had IPS screen. I thought it was a great deal more so when I was able to pick it up in a great sale.

A year later, I can speculate why there this notebook was a bargain at that time. I think the sales were not so great which might have caused HP to dial down the budget for support of this notebook. The graphics drivers are almost one and a half year old. Why would I care if this was supposed to be my work laptop? Because after buying a new monitor with built-in dock, the GPU drivers started crashing. The obvious solution is to update drivers that were release in January of 2025..

The OEM driver problem

I went to search for the drivers on the official AMD website. I found and downloaded drivers for my mobile GPU, but the installation kept failing with error 1603 - Specified path was not found. I did some more digging and found out that I now rely on HP releasing a new version of the drivers for my GPU..

Combined with the presumably poor sales of the model I purchased, and thus less incentive to release new drivers, I was going to try installing the drivers manually. And I quickly found why HP is modifying the AMD drivers before publishing them..

The Wreckoning

So facing a driver crashing every so often vs. spending some time trying to manually install Windows drivers, I chose the latter. I didn’t forget to create a restore point, then I unpacked the installation exe of the official AMD driver, located INF files and installed them from Device Manager. I didn’t get any errors and at that point I became quite optimistic. But o boy, it was about to get bad.

Obviously after installing new drivers, the system restart should follow. So I did exacly that and after entering my PIN at the Windows startup screen, I was welcomed with a booting and functioning Windows 11 installation. Or was I? Shortly after my muscle memory kicking-in and opening Firefox, the whole system froze. That’s not good is what I thought. But I was not worried.. yet.

The Fix (?)

I immediatelly tried restoring to the previous Windows restore point thinking it would fix it and I could continue on about my day, but I was wrong. After restoring, the same issue was still occuring. After I was unsuccessful, I tried booting into safe mode, checked Events, but there was no error, so I ran DDU. That should fix it, right? Wrong.. In the middle of the uninstall process, the system froze again and I knew this is going to turn into a long night..

I started disabling devices. More specifically audio devices and I noticed that it helped. So what I did next was I disabled all I could, ran the DDU and tried to uninstall both GPU and audio drivers. It seemed to work, because it didn’t freeze, but right after successfully completing the uninstall and restarting my laptop, I was now not able to do anything and the system froze immediatelly after logging in.

Great.

The real fix

If somebody actually read what I wrote, this is the part where you find out how to fix broken drivers on Windows 11.

What I had left was a WinRE, because I was not able to get even into Safe Mode. That got me thinking.. WinRE is a little operating system isolated from the installed Windows.. what if I uninstalled ALL OEM drivers and just replaced them with WinRE ones? Or even better - what if I used an installation USB that I had laying around and used drivers from there?

And that’s what I did.

Remove all OEM drivers

First you need to get into Command Line in WinRE and locate where your system and the installation media is mounted. The WinRE is running from X:\ and the system was at D:\ and the installation media at E:\.

Run this command to display all OEM drivers you have installed

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dism /image:D:\ /Get-Drivers

Because the OEM drivers are incremental, we can use a for loop to uninstall them all

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for /L %i in (0,1,100) do dism /image:D:\ /Remove-Driver /Driver:oem%i.inf

Replace number 100 with the last driver number you see from the /Get-Drivers command.

Verify no OEM drivers are left by running dism /image:D:\ /Get-Drivers again.

Unpack the installation media

Navigate to folder sources on your installation media and find file install.wim (or install.esd) and mount it in your system drive.

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md D:\Mount
dism /Mount-Image /ImageFile:E:\sources\install.wim /Index:1 /MountDir:D:\Mount /ReadOnly

This will unpack the installation media into D:\Mount. Now we can access all generic drivers that get installed in a fresh install.

Install new drivers

Now all that’s left is to install the drivers

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dism /Image:D:\ /Add-Driver /Driver:C:\Mount\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository /Recurse

And that’s it.

Cleanup

Don’t forget to cleanup the mounted media.

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dism /Unmount-Image /MountDir:D:\Mount /Discard

The aftermath

Now we can restart hopefully to a working Windows system. In my case the keyboard nor touchpad of the laptop were not working, so I had to connect at least a mouse through the USB port. In my case I also could not connect to the internet because my laptop does not have ethernet port and obviously no WiFi drivers were installed. I solved it by attaching the a USB NIC and running the autorun. In my case I had to find the INF file and install it manually but then it worked. Right after that I went to Windows Update and after checking for updates, lots of missing drivers were found and installed.

The ending

Now I am writing from the same laptop that was a main character of this story. I am doomed to wait for HP to respond to my request of updating the drivers, but I am rich in new experience and happy I didn’t have to reinstall the system entirely.
All I can do is be hopeful sharing this story is going to help other people, because while trying to troubleshait (troubleshoot with AI), I was not given any hope of recovering and the best option seemed to be a reinstall.

Remarks

I also tried changing drivers to Generic Microsoft Drivers, installing the “correct” drivers from the HP driver package, but as you might expect, installing older drivers is not going to replace the new ones.. So I used AI to create a PS script to recursively find all drivers that I installed and uninstall them. Then install the HP drivers.. but to no avail.

This tutorial should be used as a last option before giving up and reinstalling your Windows.