F
franklinhu
So, you want to swap out that old slow motherboard with something fast
and cheap? How hard could it be - my advice, be afraid, be very
afraid ....
Here are my adventures in upgrading my motherboard, may your
installation go better than mine.
I had a 5 year old k7VM2 ASRock 1.67 Ghz AMD XP 2000. I found a
Elitegroup GEForce6100PM-M2 with a 2.7 GHZ dual proc Athlon 64 with
2GB for $180. The speed really hasn't gone up that much over the
years, it still takes several minutes to boot XP.
I thought, I'd just unscrew the motherboard, put in the new one and
put back all the cables and I'd be back in business.
Well, I got the motherboard back in OK. One tip I had was to take a
picture of the USB and front panel connectors so I could then put them
back the same way on the new motherboard after I had confirmed they
had the same pinout. These connectors are all separate, but they were
labeled in my old case.
I booted up and up came the POST screen OK, so I knew the motherboard
was ok, but as soon as it tried to boot to XP, it would just restart.
I guessed that I have to reinstall the operating system.
I found this helpful link on how to upgrade a motherboard with XP
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xp.html
If you're going to upgrade your motherboard with your existing drive,
you pretty much have to assume you're going to lose everything on it.
Since there is no practical way to backup multi-gigibyte drives, I
would seriously consider getting a new harddisk and then reattach your
old one for the files. This means hours of reinstallation, but you
might avoid the headache I'm about to describe.
When I tried doing the upgrade, I had problems with the system flaking
out on me with the screen suddently display repeating parts of the
screen and dying. It would often start the part of the install where
it is verifying the disk and then just die. Several times. There may
still be a problem with the motherboard, but I found that it started
to stop recognizing the CD ROM drive and wouldn't respond to the
correct master/slave/cable select settings. Ultimately, I found the
problem when the IDE connector broke off in my hand as I pulled the
cable. A bad cable can really make your day hard. I tried another
older cable I had and I was still getting flaky operation. Finally, I
used the new IDE cable that came with my motherboard, and that seemed
to make it work a lot better, although I still saw some flakyness.
Moral of the story - if they give you a cable, use it - do not use old
IDE cables, they don't work.
When it did get through the installer start, it would put up a The
file 'Asms' on Windows XP Professional CD-ROM is needed" message, see
support.microsoft.com 311755 This happens because when the setup
restarts, it can't load the CD-ROM driver and can't read the cd-rom at
all.
The only way around this is to copy the i386 directory from the setup
disk to the harddisk before you start installation. I was able to use
xcopy because I had an old windows98 boot disk that I had around along
with a 98 setup CD. You might want to have these handy. If you're
paranoid, I'd copy the i386 directory to your harddisk before you
start.
All of this crashing means I have to sit through a lot of 'your disk
needs to be checked for consistency' and rebooting xp from the setup
disk which takes forever. I think I must have done this about 100
times.
At one point I had damaged my boot.ini file and setup said that the
disk was corrupted and could not be repaired and it aborted
installation. At this point, I thought all my data and program setup
was lost.
Also at another point, it said that it could not find an existing
version of windows. It somehow erased the file \winxp\system32\controls
\system. Fortunately, the system keeps a copy at system.sav, so I
copied that and got going. I used the recovery console to do that, but
you have to know the administrator password to do that. I forgot mine.
I ended up re-attaching my old motherboard and resetting the
administrator password. Moral of the story, know your administrator
password before you begin.
But you can repair the boot.ini file. See:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ht/repairbootini.htm
After that, it was able to complete the repair install of XP. None of
the drivers appeared to install by themselves, so I had to run the
setup Cd that came with motherboard. It would install each component
and then force a reboot - about 5 reboots in all - did I tell you that
XP doesn't boot very fast?
Well, now, I'm back to my old system pretty much, but now I need to
install service pack 2 and possibly 3 along with a zillion other
secuity updates. When I do the upgrade, the flakyness comes back and I
have several attempts where the screen goes wacky and I have to try
again. When it does start, it says that "Access denied" during the
install and it quits and then takes several minutes uninstalling
itself. How annoying.
I find support article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/873148
I attempt the 2nd method to reset security back to defaults, but after
another lengthy download/install, it still says access denied.
Ultimately, I set all keys under HKCR to the same as the security at
the root.
I still had problems. I found the following message:
http://groups.google.com/group/micr...ae2d84a7?lnk=st&q=imsiserver#c2e82a3cae2d84a7
I removed my anti-virus and anything else I could delete in my
startup, deleted the adcctl.adcctl.1 key. I looked at all the other
keys mentioned in the message. After restarting the install and
letting it copy files, I then reset all keys in HKCR to allow admin
access while it was copying files. It finally got past the registry
key part.
During several attempts, the computer crashes, so I try removing the
cd-rom to see if that improves the situation. It hasn't crashed so
far.
I started this project on saturday afternoon and now it is 11:00 PM
sunday night. Waiting for sp2 to finish ...
and cheap? How hard could it be - my advice, be afraid, be very
afraid ....
Here are my adventures in upgrading my motherboard, may your
installation go better than mine.
I had a 5 year old k7VM2 ASRock 1.67 Ghz AMD XP 2000. I found a
Elitegroup GEForce6100PM-M2 with a 2.7 GHZ dual proc Athlon 64 with
2GB for $180. The speed really hasn't gone up that much over the
years, it still takes several minutes to boot XP.
I thought, I'd just unscrew the motherboard, put in the new one and
put back all the cables and I'd be back in business.
Well, I got the motherboard back in OK. One tip I had was to take a
picture of the USB and front panel connectors so I could then put them
back the same way on the new motherboard after I had confirmed they
had the same pinout. These connectors are all separate, but they were
labeled in my old case.
I booted up and up came the POST screen OK, so I knew the motherboard
was ok, but as soon as it tried to boot to XP, it would just restart.
I guessed that I have to reinstall the operating system.
I found this helpful link on how to upgrade a motherboard with XP
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xp.html
If you're going to upgrade your motherboard with your existing drive,
you pretty much have to assume you're going to lose everything on it.
Since there is no practical way to backup multi-gigibyte drives, I
would seriously consider getting a new harddisk and then reattach your
old one for the files. This means hours of reinstallation, but you
might avoid the headache I'm about to describe.
When I tried doing the upgrade, I had problems with the system flaking
out on me with the screen suddently display repeating parts of the
screen and dying. It would often start the part of the install where
it is verifying the disk and then just die. Several times. There may
still be a problem with the motherboard, but I found that it started
to stop recognizing the CD ROM drive and wouldn't respond to the
correct master/slave/cable select settings. Ultimately, I found the
problem when the IDE connector broke off in my hand as I pulled the
cable. A bad cable can really make your day hard. I tried another
older cable I had and I was still getting flaky operation. Finally, I
used the new IDE cable that came with my motherboard, and that seemed
to make it work a lot better, although I still saw some flakyness.
Moral of the story - if they give you a cable, use it - do not use old
IDE cables, they don't work.
When it did get through the installer start, it would put up a The
file 'Asms' on Windows XP Professional CD-ROM is needed" message, see
support.microsoft.com 311755 This happens because when the setup
restarts, it can't load the CD-ROM driver and can't read the cd-rom at
all.
The only way around this is to copy the i386 directory from the setup
disk to the harddisk before you start installation. I was able to use
xcopy because I had an old windows98 boot disk that I had around along
with a 98 setup CD. You might want to have these handy. If you're
paranoid, I'd copy the i386 directory to your harddisk before you
start.
All of this crashing means I have to sit through a lot of 'your disk
needs to be checked for consistency' and rebooting xp from the setup
disk which takes forever. I think I must have done this about 100
times.
At one point I had damaged my boot.ini file and setup said that the
disk was corrupted and could not be repaired and it aborted
installation. At this point, I thought all my data and program setup
was lost.
Also at another point, it said that it could not find an existing
version of windows. It somehow erased the file \winxp\system32\controls
\system. Fortunately, the system keeps a copy at system.sav, so I
copied that and got going. I used the recovery console to do that, but
you have to know the administrator password to do that. I forgot mine.
I ended up re-attaching my old motherboard and resetting the
administrator password. Moral of the story, know your administrator
password before you begin.
But you can repair the boot.ini file. See:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ht/repairbootini.htm
After that, it was able to complete the repair install of XP. None of
the drivers appeared to install by themselves, so I had to run the
setup Cd that came with motherboard. It would install each component
and then force a reboot - about 5 reboots in all - did I tell you that
XP doesn't boot very fast?
Well, now, I'm back to my old system pretty much, but now I need to
install service pack 2 and possibly 3 along with a zillion other
secuity updates. When I do the upgrade, the flakyness comes back and I
have several attempts where the screen goes wacky and I have to try
again. When it does start, it says that "Access denied" during the
install and it quits and then takes several minutes uninstalling
itself. How annoying.
I find support article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/873148
I attempt the 2nd method to reset security back to defaults, but after
another lengthy download/install, it still says access denied.
Ultimately, I set all keys under HKCR to the same as the security at
the root.
I still had problems. I found the following message:
http://groups.google.com/group/micr...ae2d84a7?lnk=st&q=imsiserver#c2e82a3cae2d84a7
I removed my anti-virus and anything else I could delete in my
startup, deleted the adcctl.adcctl.1 key. I looked at all the other
keys mentioned in the message. After restarting the install and
letting it copy files, I then reset all keys in HKCR to allow admin
access while it was copying files. It finally got past the registry
key part.
During several attempts, the computer crashes, so I try removing the
cd-rom to see if that improves the situation. It hasn't crashed so
far.
I started this project on saturday afternoon and now it is 11:00 PM
sunday night. Waiting for sp2 to finish ...