Changing to new Mobo strategy

[fritzfield]

Can anyone provide me a strategy for swapping out my Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2 VIA chipset board to a Foxconn P35A Intel chipset board without having to re-install Vista 64 bit or having to reformat/re-install?

I have a new PCIe video card - ATI 3650 -, and 4 x 2GB Adata DDR800 RAM. Been running 2GB DDR800 w/ e6600 CPU.

The last time I tried to do a switcheroo, I had to re-install XP. Now I have Vista Ultimate Upgrade 64 bit OS on my HD. I also have a back-up of the computer and a separate back-up of the files on an external USB HD. If I have to reformat/re-install, how do I get my back-up back onto the new system?

Any thoughts/comments on what I should do, before I start, would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[PingSpike]

I don't have much experience with Vista, but with XP/2K the hang-up that was usually the cause of a nonbooting drive when swapping motherboards was a different hard drive controller. I had good luck switching the IDE controller drive to the generic "Standard IDE disk controller" or whatever its called before shutting down and swapping motherboards. Its basically a IDE driver that works with everything, although I think its slow. First boot usually took a long time and there was a lot of driver wig outs when you got into windows but if you could get it to boot you could fix everything else pretty easily.

Of course, that trick is pretty useless for when your motherboard actually dies and you can't boot the install to change the driver.

 

[bka4u2c]

I tried this recently for the heck of it. I wasn't going to keep the install anyways as I like fresh installs. But thought I would test it out.

Went from a ASUS P5N-T to a MSI P7N which have the same 780I chipset and Vista x64 Ult would not load normal or safe mode. Blue screened on both.