Hi,
I was dumb and accidentally uninstalled my com port driver for windows 8. How do I get it back. Right now my com ports are grayed out and in the device manager it has an exclamation next to it. All of my usb ports still work.
The Arduino drivers are in the drivers folder of the Arduino IDE installation folder. If you have the CH340 USB chip then that driver is not included with Arduino, you can download it here: http://www.wch.cn/download/CH341SER_EXE.html
THanks for the help, I tried downloading it and it didn't help. The actual ports on the computer are no longer their, not just in the Arduino software
You need to actually reinstall the drivers. It's an option in Device Manager.
Yeah when I search online to update the driver software it says it is up to date, however they still have a exclamation point next to it, and I am unable to open it in the arduino still program still
I went through a similar (but not quite the same) issue a long time ago.
Resetting all the com ports worked for me.
You could try THIS.
Post
In may case it worked.
Sometimes windows doesn't release the com ports properly and assigns a new one.
I also had to re-install the driver for the ch340 chips as mentioned by Pert.