How to clean MB residue from system without a format? anyone?

[CorporateSPY]

Expecting my new motherboard any day now, I'm trying to prepair in advance. Previously, I have always either picked up a new harddrive before installing a new motherboard or formatted before install. Rite now, I do not have the money to spare for a new harddrive. Basicaly what i'm getting at is... where in the registry/windows system do I go to clean out any residule information of my "old" motherboard? Are there programs/specific areas to clean? Just really really do not feel like hasteling over burning essential harddrive info off onto CDs and formatting. Thanks.

 

[Jamey]

I wouldn't do it. I tried with two different boards to keep the settings. The computers didn't run stable. I ended up formatting anyway, and I wasted tons of time. To avoid having to write to CDR's NEXT time, partition your drive into two sections. That way you can move essential data to the second partition quickly, format, then move back.

 

[groovy]

I copied this from a posting at http://www.hostclub.net some time ago. I do not know who to give the credit to for posting, I hope he doesn't mind.------------

"If you take a hdd with a functioning win 9x on it out of a computer, you can put it in any other computer and make your windows work just fine. All you have to do is boot the hdd in the new comp to safe mode, then either delete the enum key in the registry or delete everything out of device manager. I prefer to just delete out everything from device manager. then run sysedit or msconfig and rem out or uncheck everything in autoexec.bat and config.sys. It is also a good Idea but not neccisary to msconfig out startup as well. Then re-boot the machine into good old regular windows mode. Windows will come up and say there is a problem with your display settings and will promt you to run hardware detection. Run hardware detection, install appropriate drivers and bingo! Old windows and data and programs in new computer. the same can be done when just upgrading motherboard. I do this all the time at work and it has never failed when the windows load was good to start with."

 

[trmiv]

I would just backup everything you think is important, then use Groovy's suggestion. If it doesn't work the way you like, then do the reformat and you haven't lost anything. I did that method once and it worked fine, I think I might try it again.

EDIT: Anyone ever tried something like this in Windows 2000? I'm dual booting right now so I might try it on both.

 

[jd in IL]

Like groovy say's delete everything out of Device Manager. It's what I did going from a BX6r2 to the setup in my sig. Works fine.

 

[CorporateSPY]

Great, thank you... I hate having to reinstall tons and tons of software and find the serial#s for all of them repeatedly, it becomes QUITE annoying. I do realise many people purge every 6 months and reformat and reinstall for the heck of it. Its just too much of a pain when things are running well as it is.

 

[natedog]

Do you HAVE to do anything? I changed from a bx6 2 over to a Bm6 a while back and it updated some stuff in windows and worked fine. ?????

I've still got this bm6, but i'm getting a kt7 raid soon. Would this be a bigger deal, changing these motherboards because they are different chipsets? I REALLY don't want to reformat again. That gets old really fast...........

 

[CorporateSPY]

well even if it does not cause problems, I notice formatting to remove residue does provide much better performance in the past. I was just looking for a solution to get the performance up and resolve possible conflits without formatting... but if it does not give you problems do not sweat it.

 

[dunkster]

I use Groovy's method, except:

Don't remove "Plug N Play Bios" and don't remove existing Dial Up Adaptors from Device Manager.

Leaving "Plug N Play Bios" will result in immediately prompting you to install new hardware when starting up with the new mobo.

If you remove dial up adaptors, you'll just have to re-create dial up adaptor settings - unnecessary.

 

[fxsts]

Use the groovy's method. I do the same most of the time although sometimes it does not work well with some motherboards (or I might have screwed up somewhere).

In addition, if you are using a VIA chipset based motherboard now, make sure to remove all the VIA drivers like 4in1 and AGP drivers. You can only remove them easily when the system is still running on the VIA board. After you switch it to Intel board or so, they will give you errors when you try to remove them.

According to my experience, keyboard and Direct memory access controller often get detected wrong and Windows install their duplicates. Just remove both the originals and duplicates and reboot Windows again. This time Windows detect them right.

 

[dougjnn]

Great info on upgrading without having to reformat and redo everything -- maybe.

Cut and pasted a lot of it into a wordpad file for the future.

Thanks all.