Upgrade Motherboard?

[Buck Turgidson]

I have a brand-x PC with an ECS K7S5A motherboard. I don't have a lot of
experience with hardware, so forgive me if my questions are naive.

Can I pull out the disks, video, ethernet, sound, then insert a new, more
up-to-date mobo, CPU, and memory, reconnect the disks, cards, re-install the
OS, and expect it to work? What problems could I run into?

I'd like to upgrade my machine, but I have a perfectly good case, disks,
etc.

 

[Steve Reinis]

All of the hardware should be able to be reused with a new motherboard
without any ill effects. However, Windows will not be very pleased with
having to sort through the new motherboard devices and resources and figure
out which are old and which are new.

Many times you get lucky and after Windows detects all new hardware it will
carry on fine and dandy. Other times, you get non-stop crashes and a system
that performs poorly.

It's almost always best to back up your data you need to keep and then
format and reinstall the OS once you get the new motherboard fitted and up
and running.

-Steve

 

[John]

I have a brand-x PC with an ECS K7S5A motherboard. I don't have a lot of
experience with hardware, so forgive me if my questions are naive.

Can I pull out the disks, video, ethernet, sound, then insert a new, more
up-to-date mobo, CPU, and memory, reconnect the disks, cards, re-install the
OS, and expect it to work? What problems could I run into?

I'd like to upgrade my machine, but I have a perfectly good case, disks,
etc.

Sure as long as the case is a standard case - meaning mainly not a
Dell or emachines or something brandname though the case may still be
reusable , sometimes they use some weird proprietery design though
since you have a standard MB in there to begin it should be OK.
Im assuming none of the stuff you mentioned was built into the
motherboard - which of course would mean you cant move it to the new
system. A lot of the new boards have video , network stuff and sound
built in.

Most people will tell you to do a clean install of Windows - reformat
the hard disk before you take it out of the old system. However you
could try booting up in safe mode and see if it can boot up.

It worked several times before but recently when I moved some system
to new configs - it wouldnt even bootup in safe mode so I had to dump
Win XP over the old installation to get it to bootup since I didnt
want to lose all the data on the HDs.

 

[~misfit~]

I have a brand-x PC with an ECS K7S5A motherboard. I don't have a lot of
experience with hardware, so forgive me if my questions are naive.

Can I pull out the disks, video, ethernet, sound, then insert a new, more
up-to-date mobo, CPU, and memory, reconnect the disks, cards, re-install the
OS, and expect it to work? What problems could I run into?

I'd like to upgrade my machine, but I have a perfectly good case, disks,
etc.

Win 98 is better in this regard than XP. I usually have no problem with 98
doing this, it just asks for the CD and installs the required drivers for
the motherboard. With XP I believe you often need to do a re-install.

 

[Mike Walsh]

You should not have to reinstall the OS if all of the hardware looks the same to the OS. You would have to use the same video and expansion cards, and all motherboard devices must appear the same, e.g. IDE, parallel, and COM ports. I did this on my home computer when my motherboard was dying and the only changes I had to make with the OS was because I removed a Promise ATA100 expansion card and used the on board ATA100 port on the new motherboard.

 

[O |V| 3 G A]

agree,
i got winXP + sp1 v2600, and moving from a relitively new asus a7v333 to an
epox 8rda3+ (nforce400 ultra board) winXP refused to boot, even after
neumous times of pressing the reset button.

i`m guessing it was the problem of having via chipset drivers trying to boot
the epox board (nforce). uninstalling chipset drivers might help.

however, moving from the epox 8rda3+ to asus a7n8x (force400 ultra again),
winXP happily carried along as normal, dispit the most probable different
controllers the 2 boards have.

best to backup your data incase the worst happens.

tim

 

[kony]

agree,
i got winXP + sp1 v2600, and moving from a relitively new asus a7v333 to an
epox 8rda3+ (nforce400 ultra board) winXP refused to boot, even after
neumous times of pressing the reset button.

i`m guessing it was the problem of having via chipset drivers trying to boot
the epox board (nforce). uninstalling chipset drivers might help.

however, moving from the epox 8rda3+ to asus a7n8x (force400 ultra again),
winXP happily carried along as normal, dispit the most probable different
controllers the 2 boards have.

best to backup your data incase the worst happens.

Why would you assume that two boards having same chipset have "most
probable different controllers"? It had nothing to do with the Via
driver per se, just that the first swap used different controller,
while the second didn't.


Dave