Dead motherboard

[Fishead]

My motherboard is dead but hard drives seem to be ok.I can hear them running and they have WINXP installed on them.If they are ok can I use them in a new system and still access the installed WINXP that is on them?

 

[redbeard1]

You would be able to pull the drives and copy data from them, but actually trying to use Windows itself, is very doubtful. The differences in motherboards make it extremely difficult to pull a hard drive with Windows from one system, and then put it in another expecting it to boot into Windows.

 

[Fishead]

Well thats what I was wondering.I don't have any really important stuff on it.I do have some of my first digital pictures from about 8 years ago that I took with my first digital camera that I never backed up.I would like to save them if I could.

How would I do it?Put a new hard drive in and instsall a new copy of Windows and have the old hard drives attached as slaves and get off them what I need?

Thanks for answering by the way.

Richard

 

[redbeard1]

Umm...By chance is the computer with the problem the one in your signature?

 

[Fishead]

No .Thats an old system I had about 8 years ago.
Right now I have an ABIT FATALITY AN8 SLI board.I have 2 75 gig VelosiRaptor Hard drives in it.2gigs RAM.

I had been searching ebay for for a used motherboard and had bid on a few I had seen but lost out on my bids.
Its been hard to find a used one and ABIT is no longer in the Mother board business.
Its not in RAID format just 2 partitions.

 

[redbeard1]

Whew...If the drives were in a raid 0, data recovery would be much more complicated.

 

[Fishead]

So redbeard1 how would I do it?Build a new system and use a new hard drive and install a new copy of Windows on that and then put the old hard drives in a chain as slaves to copy data from them?

 

[redbeard1]

The simplistic answer would be, yes.

You say build a new system. My assumption would have been that you would reuse your existing case to install a new motherboard? I assume the Raptors are sata, so you would not run into the issue of new mobo's not having IDE ports on them for the hard drives, though if your cd/dvd drives are IDE, they will need to be replaced.

You should not have any issues getting the data off of the old drives, unless you run into permissions problems, which can be fixed. If you were using some sort of mail program, your old emails should be able to be imported back into the same program. Your Favorites/Bookmarks can be imported or copied depending on what you browse the internet with.

If your feeling adventurous you could try a couple of things to see if you can use your old load of Windows.

First, clone the drive with Windows on it to a new drive. Install the cloned drive into the new system. Boot the Windows install from the cd and do a repair install of Windows. Being that you were using an Nforce chipset, the best luck for this procedure would be to use an Nforce board again. Whatever the chipset, doing a repair install of Windows that was on one mobo, and now is on another, is a crapshoot as to whether it will boot Windows, but if you have the time, it may be worth a shot. Just do not use the original drive itself, use the clone, to safeguard your data.

Second is dependant on using similar chipsets. More so with VIA chipsets, I seen where just putting the old drive in the new system with the same chipset manufacturer, though the new board's chipset itself is newer, and the system ran through some driver detection stuff and it booted normally. I think I tried this on an Nforce and it worked as well. In trying this with Intel boards, the boards need to have the same chipset itself, like 440bx, 810, 845, 865, 915, 925, etc. Again, do this with a cloned drive to see if it works.

A new install of Windows is going to probably be the best way to go, as you are starting with a new registry, so you are not importing possible old issues, or having odd issues with old chipset residuals.

If you want to get data off now, these USB converters from Newegg work very well.

Good Luck

drive converter to usb

 

[Fishead]

Thanks for an informative answer redbeard1.Yes I would be using my old case and the hard drives are SATA.I would do a new install of windows on a new hard drive(say a nice large one like a 1 terabyte HD).
I mostly want the digital pictures,and a host of old MP3's on the hard drives.Everything else is not really important to me.
I'm not really ready money wise to do this but in the next few months or so I might have the money to make a stab at it.Right now I'm on a piece of junk Pentium 4 from way back.
My main system that I described has been down for 6 months or more while I battle tough health problems. (I have Hepatitis C and am in need of a liver & kidney transplant).So its been hard to do much about fixing it because there are more important things in life right now for me .But I do need things to take my mind of my health problems.
The USB thingy looks interesting.That would seem like the easy way to go for what I want to do.

Thanks again
Richard