Hi,
Is there anyway of removing the ch340g chip and exchange it for a working 16u2 chip due to not being able to get the drivers for the chip?
Also how could I interface a serial to usb board?
Nope, totally different footprints. But you could get a USB to Serial(TTL) adaptor for a few £/$/€
You could connect another usb/serial converter (16u2 , FTDI, cp2102, prolific) to the Rx/tx pins of the nano, probably even without removing the ch340. It might be cheaper to find a clone with some other chip, though.
The hell platform are you on that you can;'t get drivers for the CH340-series parts?
You sure you that the board a) has a CH340? (because they work almost everyhere nowadays) b) is working? (for A, locate the serial adaopter chip and examine it. Ch340's most often have 16 pins (CH340G), but 8-pin (CH340N) and 10-pin (CH340E) are also fairly common All of them are rectangular with pins along two of the sides, and none at the two ends, and under correct lighting the parts are numbered CH340 (orwhat looks like WCH. There are also parts in similar SOP/SO/MSOP packages made by the company Holtek, though theyir driver is supposed to be built into windows.). If the chip has pins on 4 sides, particulerarly very tiny stubby ones, that is a QFN package, which the CH340 is not manufacturered in; recheck part number. If the pins are very fgine pitch,but the chip is still large (SSOP-28), good chance it's either a ciounterfeit prolific chip (driver downgrade will sort it out, wideelty availabel) or an FT232RL (different driver than the others, almost certainly counterfeit, but very very good counterfeits. for B) connect it to a different computer that is known to be able to work with those parts (most work fine - they're one of my favorite go-to chips.
It wouldn't surprise me if there were sites that were very hesitant to allow drivers from un-vetted Chinese vendors. I mean, it makes me a bit nervous, and I'm not maintaining the environment for a thousand students or anyone with a security clearance...
oh yea, that could be his issue. And the dialogs do not inspire confidence, lol.... - I was taking it literally, that he couldn't "get" them, not that he wasn't authorized to install them.
The official arduino nano seems to have FT232RL on it, or at least on stock photo and design file:
https://store.arduino.cc/usa/arduino-nano
I use FT's USB-UART IC for my own stuff because the driver is usually included in major operating systems, not because somehow their driver is more trustworthy than others or their chips being inexpensive. The reality is just the opposite. Their driver has a history of sabotage about a decade ago. Either willingly or unbeknown to some manufacturers at that time, many fake FT chips were on the market and used on various products. FTDI decided to take the law in their own hands on its windows driver by permanently disabling them thus rendering the products permanently unusable. I've had a few such chips disabled by FTDI's driver. The legitimacy of such act is questionable.
The reason I don't use CH34X was because the driver isn't readily available and the cheapest ones that I can get have no EEPROM for serial numbers. So far I don't have any reason to question the trustworthiness of the driver. Apart from the download page contains occasional non-English bits here and there, I don't see how some of you may gauge trustworthiness of a driver without dissecting it somehow.
What I had to do is extract the files in the driver exe then import them into my driver store thus bypassing the lack of permissions I needed to install the exe normally, No admin privileges.
Well that sounds like a "dangerous" hack 
I might just give that a try. Our school computers have Microsoft Software Center that gives a regular user access to install a number of approved software without admin password. I just noticed arduino 1.8.x was included. Must be some favorite boys of the university upper administration to get that in the system. Anyway, I don't expect it to come with CH34X driver either. Will google what "import into driver store" means unless you're willing to detail your "solution".
What do you mean by "import into driver store"? This solution does not work for me. I have the CH341SER in ProgramFile86/Arduino/drivers, and when I connect to USB, it identifies it as a CH340 device, but still I cannot upload, and get a timeout error. My Mega board is definitely CH340G.
Solved!
The CH340 driver is installed correctly by extracting the ZIP file and updating the device manually in Device Manager. Problem was the USB ports. My laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad) has four physical USB ports. I understand that not all ports are equal. So I changed ports, and lo and behold, it started to connect and upload! Not sure if this is a feature of the PC or a problem with a USB port.
Nothing wrong with genuine CH340.
The best ones I used came with Elegoo Nano clones, no problems with working or having to use drivers.
As mentioned by others, there are some convincing looking FTDI chips around, but if you compare a genuine one from say Sparkfun, with a fake, you soon see the difference in printing, indentations and quality of any embossed logos.
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