Replacing Mobo, need advice...

[sean_dec]

Hi,
I'm replacing my Mobo and cput and was wondering what the easiest way was to use my old HD without doing a complete reinstall as I've have spent hours tweaking and setting up my system the way I like it now. I've heard of doing a windows repair install, but have heard you have to reinstall service packs, updates ect, something I was trying to avoid. I have also heard of using the sysprep tool but it seems kinda complicated for a semi newbie like me. Then, last but not least, I have read that you can just change the IDE+AGP controller driver to the Windows default driver (Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller and PCI standard PCI-to-PCI bridge respectivelly) and uninstall the vga card drivers on the old mobo then pop in the new mobo and all should be well. Any advice, has anyone tried any of these methods with success? If so which one. Sorry for the legnthy post, any help would be appriciated, thanks.

Sean

 

[gavilan]

In all honesty the absolute best thing to do would be to reinstall windows. You can try the default IDE controllers, etc. but that will severely degrade performance and you will probably run into other driver problems anyway.

Just reinstall Windows, it will be much more worth your time.

 

[sghiznaneck]

When doing a major hardware upgrade (motherboard, cpu), about the only way to get her up and running problem free is to do a complete reformat of the hard drive. There are ways around it, but the system won't be stable and itlll act wonky. Sorry, my friend, but that's the price you pay when doing a major overhaul. We've all had to go through this, and it's not such a major pain in the but, just an additional step in the process. If you have data that you can't afford to lose, after you've rebuilt it and reformatted, take the old drive (assuming it's an IDE drive), set the jumpers to slave, hook it up and you should be able to access the drive and copy the data to the new hard drive.

 

[Peerob]

I was just about to ask the same question. My pc has just hung on ''initialising chipset'' . If I have to rebuilt it means reloading xp from scratch, installing sp2 and updates. I didn't have everything backed up so first i will stick the drive in another pc to move the files across.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaages - a day wasted!