Making Existing WinXP HD work w/new MOBO

[bubbajames]

I've read a lot of tips about removing ENUM and such so as to rebuild in continue to use my existing HD w/o having to reinstall Windows but I also see the dates of the posts are quite old and appear to apply to Win98 etc..

I have my HD backed onto a separate HD using Norton Ghost. I am replacing the MOBO from Abit (NF7S) to Asus (A8N5X for AMD Athlon 64). If I mess up my wife will have me shot. What I want is to rebuilt and keep using my existing HD as is... Can someone list out the steps (filenames too), of what I must do to have success? Hopefully someone will read this tonight as I need to start early tomorrow morning.

Thanks a lot everyone up front!!

[alfie2]

if you just replace your old mobo with a new one then Xp should being fine with it. sometimes, you have to re-activate Xp.
if you replace mobo and cpu at the same time, then you will have to re-activate Xp with Microsoft.
Also, you have to remove old drivers from old mobo and install new drivers from your new MOBO.

[glc]

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=43654

Read the whole thread, especially the last post. Change the IDE driver and it will boot into Windows and rediscover your hardware. This will work if it's an IDE drive, but if it's SATA, you will probably have to do the repair reinstall and have the SATA driver on a floppy.

[bubbajames]

I did two computers yesterday. First, my sons was an MSI-6380 (Intel) that was replaced by an Abit NF7S freshly gutted from my system. The second was my computer received the ASUS A8N5X with the Athlon 64 3000+. Now, both computers were running windows xp pro.

I read all the strings I could find and I know I would be screwing myself up so I backed everything up onto other physical HD's (except for my son because I didn't really care). Having said that, if I had to reformat and reinstall on his computer it would have taken considerable time.

So lets start with my sons. I did not back anything up. I simply removed the old MOBO completely and discarded (see ebay for dead board). I took my old board 100% unchanged from my computer. Reinserted all his cards except the nic card which was no longer required. When I restarted it went into Windows XP!!! I did nothing to the registry!!! There was one conflict in the device manager which was a result of the VIA chipset (from old MOBO). I deleted it. When I rebooted to see the result, I got an incredibly fast computer load and was on the internet pronto. It was a huge relief.

Now, my computer has a slightly different story. My brother steered me to this MOBO and a new Athlon 64 3000+ (most inexpensive way to go). So here I am, Mr. Athlon XP guy with this new MOBO and thinking I've got it all ready to go. Several items came to mind when rebuilding. One, the stupid board was PCI express and my 2 month old graphic board (9800 pro, again, see ebay) is AGP. Best buy here I come. I installed the board and moved on to wiring. Why in hell did the geeks that created Athlon 64 boards change the pinning??? My Enermax 460W power supply connection wouldn't fit (see ebay again). Compucare here I come. Now I have spent over $650 (shoot, I could of bought a dell (pueck sounds repeatedly)). I finally got it all wired up. I turned on the computer and???? IT WENT TO WINDOWS!!!! YIPPEE!!!!!. Now, I followed one piece of advice on my computer. I did remove Norton Antivirus. As with both computers, I promptly put in the MOBO drivers from the original disks and for the graphic boards.

So, to sum up everything. I did nothing special at all. I had different make boards, different processor types, different graphic boards, different power supplies and when all was said and done, I had no problems replacing a MOBO and keeping my Harddrives intact w/o having to reinstall operating systems.

For those that need the encouragement to do it, I say, "make it so captain"...

[glc]

It's not the Athlon 64, it's PCI-Express. It has different and higher power requirements, hence the 24 pin connector. This is now the ATX 2.0 standard. Even some AGP boards are coming out now with the 24 pin connector. You just got caught in a transition.