Moved to another motherboard

[Jonny]

Moved from Aopen motherboard 845 chipset to Gigabyte 865 chipset. Cpus same
speed, old one Celeron, the new one is Pentium. In researching moving all,
advice gotten was that just doing a repair install with XP would do the job,
if not, clean install.

What I did find was that the repair option from the XP install CD booted
could NOT find XP partition for repair. Fixboot did not fix it. Fixmbr
fixed many file allocation problem nonexistent in the previous motherboard
installation. After 15 minutes of this, XP worked fine. Installed new
motherboard drivers, worked even better.

Windows ME in another partition that booted from a 3rd party boot manager
was showing a bogus drive letter in the middle of all my drive letters.
Showed zero bytes in raw format. Clean installed ME with same results on
reformatted partition. Wrangling this problem further, removed the FAT32
partition, and created identical one in the new unallocated space, and
formatted. Installed ME again. ME worked fine, and no bogus drive letter.

In my opinion, both problems were the result of the bios interpretation of
the boot hard drive CHS (WD 80GB). I knew this existed on old systems, but
mine is more recent and same Award bios manufacturer. Yet, I NEVER see this
mentioned at this newsgroup regarding moving all to another motherboard, any
motherboard, nor even hinted at....
Thanks for your help.

 

[Noel Paton]

I suspect that you were in fact using some form of DDO on the old system -
and re-writing the MBR with the XP fixmbr command got rid of that.

--
Noel Paton (MS-MVP 2002-2006, Windows)

Nil Carborundum Illegitemi
http://www.crashfixpc.com/millsrpch.htm

http://tinyurl.com/6oztj

Please read on how to post messages to NG's

 

[Jonny]

Nope, I avoid any disk interpretation software in the MBR disk area like the
plague. Had similar problem with 98SE as ME, except 2 new and unaccessible
zero byte partitions.

--
Jonny

I suspect that you were in fact using some form of DDO on the old system -
and re-writing the MBR with the XP fixmbr command got rid of that.

--
Noel Paton (MS-MVP 2002-2006, Windows)

Nil Carborundum Illegitemi
http://www.crashfixpc.com/millsrpch.htm

http://tinyurl.com/6oztj

Please read on how to post messages to NG's

 

[Jeff Richards]

You can't move a hard drive from one motherboard to another and assume it
will work. Usually it will, but sometimes it won't, and the type of problem
you mention is typical. As you guess, it's associated with the way that CHS
values are mapped.

It has nothing to do with the process of updating the system for the new
motherboard - the same problem can occur with a non-booting drive. AFAIK
it's not related to the age of the motherboard (assuming both boards can
cope with the drive capacity). BIOS brand doesn't seem to be relevant.

The issue has been mentioned here many times.

 

[Jonny]

Agree with all but the last sentence. Hardly even a glimmer of that any
more.

Its even worse in the XP newsgroups. Some outright say in the XP newsgroups
just move it, no problem. No spanking from the MVPs who participate, and
same don't even mention the CHS interpretation difference if they do
respond. In fairness, some mention fixmbr, but don't say why. Some readers
like me think, and if there's no substantiating reason, I won't do it until
all else is tried.
---
Jonny

You can't move a hard drive from one motherboard to another and assume it
will work. Usually it will, but sometimes it won't, and the type of problem
you mention is typical. As you guess, it's associated with the way that CHS
values are mapped.

It has nothing to do with the process of updating the system for the new
motherboard - the same problem can occur with a non-booting drive. AFAIK
it's not related to the age of the motherboard (assuming both boards can
cope with the drive capacity). BIOS brand doesn't seem to be relevant.

The issue has been mentioned here many times.