Windows 7 - swapped out motherboard

[Chosonman]

I recently had to swap out the motherboard on my wife's computer with Windows 7 Ultimate installed. To my surprise the OS loaded, detected and installed the new drivers and worked perfectly after that. I did have to re-activate Windows, but I had anticipated an extra 3-5 hours reinstalling all the software that I had previously. I'm very happy, just thought I'd share my experience.

 

[jdjbuffalo]

That is awesome to hear. I remember last trying that in the early Windows XP days. It wouldn't boot back into Windows. I'm glad to see they've made some progress. Hopefully this can be an expectation for OS' going forward.

 

[RebateMonger]

The MS-recommended way to move Vista or W7 to a new motherboard is to back it up with Complete PC Backup and to restore the system to the "new" computer. During the restore process there's an option to load new drivers for the disk controller, which is the usual reason for problems moving to a new motherboard.

 

[phreaqe]

i kinda did that with windows vista beta, but instead put the HD into a different comp. it took about 30 minutes to fully boot, but it had reinstalled all the hardware except for 1 minor device and worked like a champ. i was amazed. in the XP days it would have blue screened 5 seconds in.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
The MS-recommended way to move Vista or W7 to a new motherboard is to back it up with Complete PC Backup and to restore the system to the "new" computer. During the restore process there's an option to load new drivers for the disk controller, which is the usual reason for problems moving to a new motherboard.

Now that's neat.

Do you know if there is something similar for XP? Will WHS bare-metal restore allow you to load disk controller drivers on restore?

 

[VirtualLarry]

burp

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Do you know if there is something similar for XP? Will WHS bare-metal restore allow you to load disk controller drivers on restore?

XP can be migrated by doing a "Repair Install" on the OS after it's been moved to the new hardware. That allows XP's installer to put the new disk controller drivers in place.

WHS has some neat driver abilities. It keeps a copy of every driver used by the clients being backed up. But those are only used to let the WHS restore program talk to the disk conroller and to the network so it can find the backups and write them to the computer's disk. WHS does NOTt provide a motherboard migration function when doing a restore.

WHS system restores are great...as long as you are restoring to the same (or compatible) motherboard.

On the subject of Vista/W7 hardware migrations, I should point out that, though Microsoft and others say that it has a good chance of working, it has NOT worked for me. I've attempted three restores of Vista/2008 to new hardware and haven't gotten a single one to successfully boot.

My last attempt was simply a migration from a 2008 server with an Intel ICH7 controller to the SAME machine, but with a HighPoint RAID controller controlling the disk. Nothing else changed. And I still can't get that one to boot.