Accidentally dumped HP's photocard drive drivers in Vista!

Help! I accidentally dumped HP's photocard drive drivers in Vista! Or at least, that's what I think I did.

I was cleaning a friend's new machine. He had just bought it and it came with all kinds of crap. So I removed a bunch of unneeded programs...some of which were the HP photo progs. I think I got rid of all of them. Now, my friend tells me that when he throws his camera's SD card into the drive on the front of the CPU, that there's no dice...that Vista won't read it and the card doesn't come up.

Does is sound like I deleted too many programs? or perhaps one of those progs was crucial to those photo drives reading photo cards?

Is there a way to find which one is necessary for that drive to read? or do I have to use the system restore disk that came with his machine? Please tell me that I don't have to re-install everything, including vista.

Much Respect and many thanks in advance.

Peace,
Tom

 

Media card readers are basically storage devices, and Windows sees them more or less as if they were another hard drive. If you go into Computer, there should be a bunch drives listed: the main C: drive, maybe a recovery partition called D:, the CD/DVD drives, and then all the media slots (usually 4). If those 'extra' drives aren't listed, check the device manager for any question marks or red X's. Visiting the HP web site's driver section and typing in the PC's model number will provide a list of drivers. Download and re-install the media reader drivers... or post the model of the PC here and we'll provide a link.

 

If the computer is an HP, did it come with restore and recovery CDs? If so, you may be able to grab exactly what you need from one of the CDs.