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Changing to a new Computer using the same hard drive - any way for it to boot up?

S

Superartus

Senior member
Hi guys,
Ok here is the problem, everytime I upgrade someones computer by installing a new mobo + cpu, windows xp never loads and halts at boot up. Of course this is feasible since the whole mobo changed which makes xp still load up it's original drivers for the old mobo. Is there any way where you can change the mobo and not have to reformat the whole hd again? I mean i want to keep the whole xp intact and all software the way it was.
I appriciate any replys. Thanks
 
What I would do is uninstall all the drivers in device manager, specially the system drivers, before switching over.
 
Originally posted by: moonsite
What I would do is uninstall all the drivers in device manager, specially the system drivers, before switching over.
Click to expand...

Yeah i was thinking if that would work before i install the new mobo. It looked promising but haven't done it.
 
If have the same motherboard drivers I wonder if you wouldn't have to change anything. For example going from a kt266a to a 939 K8t800 pro with the latest VIA 4 in 1's. You should boot up and keep on going right? I thought/figure if you are switching motherboard platforms than you would have to do the fresh install or cleansing process. HMM
 
Well I had a Gigabyte fail.....replaced it with an A-Open board with the same 845 chipset. It booted up and everything seemed ok, but......windows update wouldn't work (complained about hardware changes) and I had several other strange problems. I re-installed Xp over itself, but that didn't fix anything. After wasting a lot of time, finally wiped everything and started fresh.....
 
I've swapped motherboards and processors out as a unit before and had them boot up fine.
In the BIOS before you run the first time you set ECSD to ENABLED to allow the machine to
recognize new hardware configuration and equipment.
 
Originally posted by: Superartus
Hi guys,
Ok here is the problem, everytime I upgrade someones computer by installing a new mobo + cpu, windows xp never loads and halts at boot up. Of course this is feasible since the whole mobo changed which makes xp still load up it's original drivers for the old mobo. Is there any way where you can change the mobo and not have to reformat the whole hd again? I mean i want to keep the whole xp intact and all software the way it was.
I appriciate any replys. Thanks
Click to expand...

You're probably getting STOP 7B errors when you try to boot with the new MB - is that correct? Turn off automatic reboots so you can see the error messages.

If so, preinstall the new chipset's IDE drivers on the old machine (ie while the HDD is in the old machine) and that should allow you to boot into the new machine with the HDD.

The easiest solution/way to moving hardware around is to have a motherboard+IDE HDD that you have set up already, then install, say, a SCSI card or SATA card into that copy of Windows, then ghost the hard drive from the IDE HDD to the SCSI or SATA HDD (which will then boot successfully because you already installed the card's drivers). Then, you can easily move Windows to any machine - just move the hard drive and the SCSI/SATA card, and you're in business - no more STOP 7B errors at bootup.
 
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