motherboard swap

[fpoverflow]

I'm about to swap from an ancient amd 2500+ nforce2 based system to a 650i gigabyte motherboard in XP Pro. HDs and optical drives are remaining unchanged for now (all PATA).

I was thinking about following this plan of attack:
1) Set ATA controller to generic controller in device manager, shutdown, then swap the MB and reboot straight into XP in safe mode and load the 650i drivers (along with the new video drivers).

If I get an inaccessible boot drive then:
2) Boot from XP CD (hopefully this works), and repair the existing installation, and go from there.

Is that the best way to approach the swap? Thanks for your input.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: fpoverflow

Is that the best way to approach the swap?

You can try it. :shocked:
But going from an older AMD CPU / MB combo to a new Intel CPU / MB combo. I would reformat and do a fresh XP load. :thumbsup::laugh:

Why bring all your old crap into a brand new house?

 

[fpoverflow]

I see your point, but I dread reinstalling all my apps and getting everything reconfigured the way it was. Unless there is some easy way to do that..

 

[Jerry944T]

I tried that once and it was a disaster. Went from one AMD board to another. It booted up OK but I was constantly plauged by BSOD to the point that a reformat looked like a very good option.

 

[fpoverflow]

Jerry, which option did you use, 1 or 2?

 

[LouPoir]

Repair the existing installation is your best bet. But you will always wonder with any error of computer slowdown if it is as a result on not re-installingXP with a reformat.

 

[fpoverflow]

I'm sure it'll seem fast to me no matter what!! But point taken. If I do get BSODs or erratic behavior before I OC, then I will definitely reinstall.

I noticed in my add/remove programs that I have an option to uninstall all my nvidia drivers (audio, ethernet, gart, ide, memory controller, nforce pci system mgmt) . Do you think that makes sense before swapping the MB and doing the repair? I'm thinking that will put the ATA controller back to the generic controller, and clear out a lot of junk as well.

 

[LouPoir]

This may help --

Check it out

 

[Slugbait]

I just tried hooking an old hard drive that had an XP installation onto my AMD machine a few days ago. Windows wouldn't even begin to load.

The OS was installed while the drive was attached to an Intel-based system.

Then I recalled a year ago when I first got this machine from my wife...I tried hooking her hard drive into an Intel-based system to scrape her data, and met the same fate.

Didn't bother to try and figure out if I could get the system up and running...figured it was too much of a hassle. Fresh install was better anyway.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: fpoverflow
I'm sure it'll seem fast to me no matter what!! But point taken. If I do get BSODs or erratic behavior before I OC, then I will definitely reinstall.

I noticed in my add/remove programs that I have an option to uninstall all my nvidia drivers (audio, ethernet, gart, ide, memory controller, nforce pci system mgmt) . Do you think that makes sense before swapping the MB and doing the repair? I'm thinking that will put the ATA controller back to the generic controller, and clear out a lot of junk as well.

The thread linked above has a LOT of information.

If you remove as many drivers as you can beforehand, then do a repair install afterwards, you are unlikely to have problems. I've done this twice, and other than requiring a little juggling of video drivers to get everything recognized properly it has worked fine. Using sysprep should in theory be even less disruptive, since you won't need to reinstall Windows updates afterwards.

Worst case is you just wipe it and do a full reinstall. You have very little to lose by trying to migrate your current OS installation.

 

[Puffnstuff]

When I moved from nf2 to nf4 in xp pro I first uninstalled every nf and mb specific driver and uninstalled any monitoring programs that I had installed. Once I was sure that I'd removed them all then I shut down and made the swap. It went well and I was able to reboot using the generic ms drivers and reinstalled my drivers once the machine was completely rebooted. The hardware change will likely cause you to have to reactivate windows so be prepared for that possibility. Nvidia designed the nforce chipset to make it easier to upgrade from one version to another. Today I run the 650i however I had to do a clean install in vista.

 

[ch33zw1z]

fresh install is your best bet if you're worried about performance. good luck with your venture.

 

[fpoverflow]

Thanks all. I'm going to review that link above more closely and then make the swap in an hour or so.

 

[fpoverflow]

The manual part of the installation, installing the new MB took longer than I expected. But, it all worked like a charm once I got my memory settings properly set. For the record, I uninstalled my nforce drivers (nforce2 to be exact), then I installed the latest 650i drivers before I performed the swap. Before I swapped the last thing in the device manager was the standad dual channel pci ide controller. In fact, it is still there now. For those interested in the HAL compatibility, I went from an athlon xp 2500 to a e6420 without any problem. I started out at uniprocessor ACPI I believe.

 

[Jerry944T]

I used option one but regardless you are so much better off with a fresh format.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Jerry944T
I used option one but regardless you are so much better off with a fresh format.

Maybe he likes a landfill of an OS :laugh: