Changing Motherboard - temporarily

[AndrewPaulNet]

Found out my board has issues so I'm gonna have it repaired under the limited warranty.

I can't do without my XP machine for 1 or 2 weeks. I'm going to get a loaner board in the meantime...and use it with my current setup

So basically I'm going to yank my board and stick in another board, and keep my original hard drives and all that.

How'd I go about getting XP to work with it? Would I have to reinstall over my current installation or is there a file or directory or registry key I can somehow delete to force it to detect all the hardware over again?

Emergency, so please let me in on any info you have.

What do you recommend I do? Thanks.

P.S

If you read this and can respond realtime, don't hesitate; check out my IM info and add it and hit me up if I'm online.

Thanks!

 

[Fern]

If the loaner mobo has the same chipset it should be no problem to switch. If a different mobo this is problematic. To avoid problems fouling your os with the different chipset drivers a reformat/reinstall is generally preferred. here's an article in Anandtech which discusses how to swap w/o said reformat/reinstall link

You may want to consider ghosting your current HD to another HD, do the above steps on original HD when installing new (different mobo), the upon receiving your old mobo, ghost back to your original/current setup. This would avoid fubaring your current set up with two mobo swaps
Good Luck

 

[lowtech1]

Windows 2K Pocedures - Changing Motherboards & Keeping Windows

 

[AndrewPaulNet]

Thanks alot guys.

The process was a success. About the worst that happened was I forgot to uninstall my Omega ATI drivers...and I'd have blue screens - luckily they weren't instantaneous or affecting safe mode booting, so I simply uninstalled them there.

I switched out to another MSI board, Thank God, so the transition wasn't a mess. Actually, the biggest difference between this and my board is I think the north bridge I think? or the south bridge? I'm not sure - basically, my board is a KT333 and this is a KT266A, not a huge difference I don't think. Also, my board has raid and this one doesnt.

I HOPE they give me a new board, but I doubt it immensely. I just hope they REALLY REALLY test it before they send it back - IF they do a repair job or give me a refurbed replacement. A new board would be sweet though - I could really wait till Summer to upgrade and get myself some good stuff.

Thanks again for the links. I'm gonna check em' out now for future reference (in case I have to eventually deal with switching out with different chipsets).