Rebuilding Machine

[Al]

Hey all, just a quick question if someone can help me out.

If I instal a new motherboard, cpu and ram, will I have to reinstal windows
from scratch onto a blank hard drive?

I ask because I upgraded those things today, and now bios on my machine wont
load from my old hard drive...it says an error occured last time I exited and
I am given the choice of safe mode/last known good configuration etc.

Thanks for any help
Al

 

[Al]

I realise that wasnt very much information, I installed an Asrock AM2NF3-VSTA
(Socket AM2) motherboard, an AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core 4200+ and 2Gig of 800MHz
DDR2 RAM. When I start the machine up bios starts and lists all of the
hardware correctly, but after the first screen it displays a blank screen and
a flashing "_" which moves down 3 lines...then reverts to the boot up options
I mentioned before. Whichever I chose the monitor goes off and the machine
restarts.

Thanks

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

Your upgrade will work if the system was installed from a standard XP setup
CD. All you need to do is run setup, and select the second 'repair' option
offered. (Press "ENTER" at the first prompt to start setup, the 'repair' is
later)
If the system was 'preinstalled' when you purchased it, doing the hardware
upgrade might not be possible with the software you now own.

 

[Al]

I made the machine myself so it wasnt preinstalled, I will find my xp cd
later and hope that the repair option fixes it for me. Thanks a lot for the
help, I hope it works.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Hey all, just a quick question if someone can help me out.

If I instal a new motherboard, cpu and ram, will I have to reinstal windows
from scratch onto a blank hard drive?

Usually not. Almost always you need to at least a repair installation
in that circumstance. It happens rarely, but sometime the repair
installation isn't sufficient and you need a clean reinstallation.