I’m not there yet, but I’ve had experiences with Windows upgrades in the past and it has worked so far.
Try setting windows to allow installing unsigned drivers.
3 Ways to Disable Driver Signature Enforcement in Windows 11 (windowsreport.com)
If that doesn’t work…sometimes drivers are bundled with ‘installers’. The installer might fail for some reason, while the driver itself is perfectly fine. In this case, if the drivers are not packed in some kind of exe archive, try using the Windows device manager. Point it to the directory with the inf file(s) and see if windows can install it that way.
If the drivers are packed in some way that you cannot extract them, then you can usually find them in the driverstore of your working PC with an earlier version of windows.
Location Of Drivers In Windows 10/11 (intowindows.com)
So…find the driverstore directory of a PC that has the functioning drivers. Copy the whole folder (for the device that you need) to the desktop of your new Windows PC (don’t try to copy it to the driverstore directory of the newer Windows installation straight away…just put it on the desktop or somewhere handy).
Use the windows device manager to ‘locate’ and install the drivers from this copied folder. Once it’s installed, you can trash the desktop copy.
If that doesn’t work…you might also need to use a text editor to change the .inf file of the driver. Look for references to Windows versions and change those to later ones. I.E Some time ago my Roland XR’s USB MIDI driver stopped installing from Windows 8.1 forward. In a Roland XR USB MIDI driver’s .inf file, I found:
[Roland.NTamd64.6.1]
;; Windows7
%RDID0045DeviceDesc%=RDID0045Install, USB\VID_0582&PID_006D ; FANTOM-X
[Roland.NTamd64.6.2]
;; Windows8
%RDID0045DeviceDesc%=RDID0045Install, USB\VID_0582&PID_006D ; FANTOM-X
and added some lines:
[Roland.NTamd64.6.1]
;; Windows7
%RDID0045DeviceDesc%=RDID0045Install, USB\VID_0582&PID_006D ; FANTOM-X
[Roland.NTamd64.6.2]
;; Windows8
%RDID0045DeviceDesc%=RDID0045Install, USB\VID_0582&PID_006D ; FANTOM-X
[Roland.NTamd64.6.3]
;; Windows8.1
%RDID0045DeviceDesc%=RDID0045Install, USB\VID_0582&PID_006D ; FANTOM-X
[Roland.NTamd64.6.4]
;; Windows10
%RDID0045DeviceDesc%=RDID0045Install, USB\VID_0582&PID_006D ; FANTOM-X
From there, I was able to install the driver using the Windows device manager. I never could get the Roland ‘installer app’ to work, but it worked if I found the XR device in the Windows Device Manager, chose ‘locate driver on disk’ (or something similar), and pointed it to the directory with the *.inf and driver files. Windows found it and installed it.
If you edit an inf file, again, you’ll need to allow Windows to install unsigned drivers. Once the driver is installed, you can usually turn that driver security back on, as the kernel binary parts of the driver might still be properly signed and make it past all the security checks/tests on boot.
