Hit 'start' and in the Search bar, type "DEVMGMT.MSC" (or make a shortcut to it on the desktop).

Click 'View' and select 'Show hidden devices'.  Now you should be able to see your 'Ghost' drivers (Nicholas Cage not included).

Better yet you could collect your HWID's & post them here.

In the future you may find that before a reinstall of windows that there may have already been a provision in your old OS to make rescue disks.
Better yet, wouldn't this be a great time to learn how to make an updated Windows7 install disc with most of the pertinent drivers already included?

This might be quite lenghty but heres the whole story. My friend owns a old laptop which had some serious virus problem. He didn't have a recovery disc with him so we used a different disc (which I obtained somehow) to reformat the laptop. Unfortunately, this meant reinstalling most of the drivers.

I've installed most of the drivers from:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/Te … nvOID=2093

I tried installing all the drivers in the link but some of them couldn't be installed. The main drivers which couldn't be installed that I'm concerned about are the chipset driver(sp36881 is the filename in the above mentioned link) and the wireless adapter driver(sp38052).

When I tried to install the chipset driver I got an error message saying, "This computer does not meet the minimum requirements for installing the software. Setup will exit."

When I tried installing the wireless adapter driver, I managed to extract the file in a folder but after the extraction was complete, nothing happened. I tried to manually start the installation by browsing to the folder that I extracted the file on and then double clicking the setup file, but again nothing happened.

There are various sources in the internet saying that not installing the chipset driver might lead to not being able to install several other drivers. I don't know for sure whether this is true in my case.

Lastly, I checked what network adapter hardwares I had by going to Device Manager>Network adapters. The only thing I had was "Realtek RTL8139/810x Family Fast Ethernet NIC". I'm pretty sure I have a wireless network adapter in the laptop because I could connect to the internet using wireless connection before reformatting the laptop. I used the "Add Hardware" feature in hopes of fixing the problem but I have no idea what wireless adapter I have and therefore cannot decide which one to choose from the huge list of wireless adapters which I'm given.

A lot of my actions might seem stupid as I didn't know what I was doing half of the time and therefore would like to ask help from someone with greater knowledge on the subject.

Thanks