Jethro said:
Interesting...Noone told me that before.
Okay will do
Actually, it can be done, and I have done so on at least two or more
occasions. It may be too late for you at this point, and in fact you may
have already gone the clean install route, but fwiw, here is my process for
changing motherboards. I suspect your problems, probably stemmed from the
new mb booting into your existing XP install.
Create a backup image, of my current system, to have just in case.
Backup my settings, with the file and trasfer utility in XP, again to have,
just in case.
Remove the motherboard drivers, from add/remove programs if there, and from
device manager.
Disable any start up programs that might interfere, for instance I run ATI
Tray Tools, AVG Antivirus, those I would temporarily disable from startup
through msconfig. I also make a note, of my startup items in msconfig to
have as a reference for later.
Shut down the system for the last time.
Install new motherboard.
Power up system, immediately go into bios on first boot. Do NOT let the
system boot up into XP - this is very important. Confirm bios settings, ie
hard drives recognized, date and time correct, temp ok, etc.
Insert my XP Cd rom in the drive.
Set the bios first boot device, to cd rom drive.
Exit bios saving settings to reboot.
When prompted during boot to press any key to continue booting from the cd
rom, do so.
VERY IMPORTANT - DO NOT LET THE NEW BOARD BOOT INTO THE EXISTING XP
INSTALLATION.
Boot from the XP Cd, at first screen, select new install ( not the recovery
option ), on next screen, it will find your existing XP installation, choose
it, and press R for repair. ( you will be given an option to delete or
repair the existing installation). This is basically an inplace upgrade, of
your existing XP install.
During the repair, it will reboot at some point, this time, do NOT press any
key to boot from the cd rom, let it continue to boot from the hard drive.
Once successfully repaired, install the new motherboard drivers off the cd
that came with it, or downloaded from the mfg's website.
Then, go to windows update, and get all the needed updates again.
Defrag the newly repaired XP install.
Look in device manager, verify no conflicts or problem devices.
Note: If your XP cd rom, is pre SP2, and your existing install is SP2 , then
you will need to either uninstall SP2 prior , or better yet, create a
slipstreamed XP SP2 disc. Autostreamer, is a great utility, for creating
slipstreamed XP SP2 cd's.
As mentioned, I have done this with great success. Of course, anyone's
mileage, may vary. But it is a time saver, and worst case scenario, if it
does not work, is to go ahead and do that clean install. If successful, a
repair install is much quicker, retaining your programs and settings. If
not, you have not lost a whole lot , then you can do that clean install, but
make sure you have all the cd's for your programs you'll need, and all your
data backed up to a safe place.
I will be upgrading, from an Athlon based system, to an Intel Core2 duo on
an EVGA 680i sli mb , hopefully sometime this weekend, and plan on doing it
this way as well. If I do, I will be glad to report back how it goes.
Hope this information is helpful,
Don
