replacing a motherboard

[sainswor99]

I'm tired of my crappy ECS motherboard flaking out on me all the time, but I wasn't ready to completely rebuild my server. I got a new motherboard, and will be doing the surgery sometime in the near future.

Whenever I've done a build in the past, I've always reinstalled the OS; however, I was wondering if Windows XP would survive such a drastic hardware replacement. Can I just swap out the motherboard and reboot?

Opinions?

[davephan]

When my old system board die, I was not able to recover the XP Pro computer to a new system board with images with Ghost 9.0. I also received some support from Microsoft, but those steps did not work either. I ended up reloading everything by hand, taking periodic images on each major step. If you take periodic images during the building process, then you never have to start the rebuild over from scratch.

When I purchased my new system board, I thought about buying two identical system boards, that way I still could recover with an image. I did not buy an identical system board yet.

Another way to get around this type of problem in the future the next time the system board replacement is needed, would be to use VMware. The operating host operating system would still have to be loaded manually, but the VM could be just copied to the new environment. There is system overhead to run VMware, and it will run slower than if it runs natively on the computer.

There might be other imaging products that can handle moving from one system board to another.


Dave

[SHS]

It best to a backup any critical data that you absolutely cannot afford to lose just in case anything gose wrong,

To do this insert the Windows XP CD and restart the PC make sure that your booting from the CDrom or DVDrom.
Choose the 'press enter to set up Windows XP now' option.
Press F8 to skip through the EULA.
Now press R to begin a repair installation.
Your system will go through the entire XP install process, but will not attempt to replace any of your existing data. It will simply reinstall the system files and redetect all hardware. Once the process has completed, your computer will reboot and you can move on to the next step.
Yes you must Reactivating Windows XP.

[sainswor99]

Well, this is the first time I've replaced a system board without doing a CPU replacement as well; the only reason I'm NOT doing it this time, is because I'm trying to be cheap

VMWare is a possibility, I guess, but it seems silly (in some ways) to run an image on a single-purpose machine. It would make upgrades a lot easier in the future, however.

Might have to think about it.

In the meantime, I need to start consolidating recordings and getting them off my C drive . Thanks for the advice.

[Djc208]

I changed my gaming rig from an older P4 socket 476 motherboard/CPU to a C2D MB/CPU and had no issues (and I was using that hybrid ASrock MB). Booted into windows (took a while the first time), uninstalled the MB drivers from the old setup and put the new drivers in and all was fine. I did have to re-register windows. I may have just got lucky but I had no real problems.

[Menehune]

I read somewhere on the web that you can change the motherboard if you first remove all motherboard specific drivers from the windows install, then when windows asks to reboot, shutdown and then swap the motherboard. Then after it reboots (and rebuilds itself) reinstall all the motherboard drivers and the graphic card drivers. Something about removing the ASPI processor drivers, chipset drivers, usb/firewire and changing the desktop video mode to the Microsoft "default" VGA driver (800x600x256colors?).

I've never done it on any of my machines. I usually reformat and reinstall everything.

If you use Acronis or Ghost, they have a "browse image" feature that allows you to look into the image to recover data files from it. That won't help you with the applications since they probably will need to be reinstalled, but if you find you miss a data file, you should be able to recover it from the image.

[GKusnick]

There's a trick I used to do with Win98 in this situation; I have no idea whether it will work on XP, but it might.

First thing is obviously to back up your current state. If you can image your boot partition, that would be best, so if all else fails you can put back your old mobo, restore the image, and be up and running again quickly.

Next, copy the driver disks for your new mobo (and any other oddball devices) into temp folders on your hard disk. This is to eliminate any chicken-and-egg dependencies during driver reinstallation.

Then bring up Device Manager and delete all devices just before shutting down for the last time.

Power down, swap out the mobo, and power back up. On bootup Windows should redetect everything and load the drivers appropriate to your new mobo. If it asks for driver disks, point it to the temp folders you made before shutting down.

Again, this used to work for me with Win98. I haven't actually tried it on XP, but it might be worth a shot.

[lobosrul]

I didn't see anywhere that you specified this.

If your mobo and its replacement are the same chipset, then you may get away with doing no driver replacements at all! I've done this with an NVIDIA board before. Both nforce4.

Worst comes to worse, after you've installed the new board, and you can't boot up, you should be able to boot into safe mode and uninstall all the system drivers.

[TechBill]

Motherboard swap I have done in the past I always only removed ide controller driver from the device manager before shutting down to swap board.

So just try removing the ide controller driver from device manager first and swap moitherboard then the rest of the devices drivers should be remove automatically and updated by XP once it sucessfully boot up. if that didn't work then you can always boot in safe mode and start removing devices that XP is complaining about in blue screen boot up.

Of course as always back up first.


Bill

[MeInMaui]

SHS got it right. I've done this on two separate occasions. Here is a link to detailed instructions. HTH

Aloha,
Mike

[sainswor99]

I totally missed SHS's post the first time I was watching this; that does sound easy.

Thanks!

[sainswor99]

Just wanted to update on the status of this:

I finally managed to have a day to replace the board; after a few power issues (i was shorting the board out against the case), I got it installed and ready to go.

I booted up Windows XP, with the recovery disk in the drive, but I must have missed the BIOS setting to autostart the CD. Windows apparantly recovered on its own, however, and the drivers loaded and the mother board transplant is complete.

I'm using the ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2 in case anybody's interested. I kept the same memory, same drives, same power supply, same CPU; just switched out the MOBO. I plan to upgrade the power supply and CPU next, assuming that everything stays stable.

Thanks for all the help.

[poluxproject]

I guess you guys said the magic words refering to VMware and caught my attention.
Is anybody succesfully running Sage on VMware? I know that the Sage server will run properly but what about the tv tunners? will the tv tuner drivers work properly? It was my understanding that drivers for physical devices were hiden from the guest OS and replaced by virtual drivers when available ( so in this case sage running on the guest OS will never locate any tuners).
Best
Polux