Motherboard Switching.

[wormbaby]

I'm in the process of upgrading my motherboard from an AGP board to an PCI-E board. Was just wondering if I just swap the motherboard, would Win XP run without reinstalling windows?

 

[Erasertone]

NO, you have to reinstall windows. The OS is the one that stores all information of your mobo if you change your mobo windows will not be able to recognize it.

 

[wormbaby]

I can just do a simple reinstall, without formating my harddrive, right?

 

[Erasertone]

if it doesn't prompt you to format then you don't need to.

 

[wormbaby]

thx for the quick answer.

 

[Erasertone]

I guess everytime you reinstall windows the setup just automatically format the harddrive.

 

[Allio]

No, it doesn't format the hard drive if you don't ask it to. It deletes your old Windows directory. The only things you lose are your drivers and your registry.

 

[Erasertone]

No, it does format the harddrive there's no such way that you can't format when you reinstall.

 

[Erasertone]

before you install your new mobo if you have some important data in your harddrive make a partiton first then copy those important data to that partition.

 

[Wentelteefje]

How about repairing/restoring (don't know what the correct translation is) Windows then? When doing that, you're not formatting too... I agree, those aren't the best ways to "install" Windows, but they're possible...

 

[Erasertone]

if you're good enough to use the recovery console then it might be possible, I tried that once but it's too complicated.

 

[Allio]

Originally posted by: Erasertone
No, it does format the harddrive there's no such way that you can't format when you reinstall.

What the hell are you talking about? It asks you if you want to format; if you choose no, it deletes your Windows directory instead and leaves the rest of the drive intact. That's it. I did exactly that about two weeks ago, I'm sure thousands of others on this forum do it all the time as well.

 

[Puffnstuff]

If you are upgrading from say a nf2 to a nf4 mb then no you don't need to reinstall windows. What you do need to do is uninstall the chipset drivers, graphics drivers and any mb specific software and drivers before you shut it down and remove it. I did this when upgrading a machine running an abit nf7-s v2 to a msi k8n neo4 plat and it went smoothly without incident. When windows boot up on the new hardware it started asking for drivers and I hit cancel and installed the nf4 and nvidia graphics drivers and all was well.

 

[Erasertone]

What the hell are you talking about? It asks you if you want to format; if you choose no, it deletes your Windows directory instead and leaves the rest of the drive intact. That's it. I did exactly that about two weeks ago, I'm sure thousands of others on this forum do it all the time as well.

Where did you get that? maybe you've done that on a different OS. the windows setup will prompt you first to format your harddrive to a file system of your choice before reinstalling, there's no "yes or no" option there.

 

[torpid]

Originally posted by: Erasertone

What the hell are you talking about? It asks you if you want to format; if you choose no, it deletes your Windows directory instead and leaves the rest of the drive intact. That's it. I did exactly that about two weeks ago, I'm sure thousands of others on this forum do it all the time as well.

Where did you get that? maybe you've done that on a different OS. the windows setup will prompt you first to format your harddrive to a file system of your choice before reinstalling, there's no "yes or no" option there.

No, it asks you which partition to install windows on. If there is an existing partition you can just highlight it and hit enter.

When I last installed a motherboard upgrade, I just re-installed XP Pro onto the same partition and not only did it not reformat or delete anything, but once it was done all of my programs and settings were intact. I'm hoping the same will be true of my upgrade later today.

 

[Greenman]

I went from an NF2 board to a ULI board with an Opteron. Windows booted, I installed new drivers and everything works fine.

 

[wormbaby]

man, so. Does anyone have actually experience with upgrading from NF3 to NF4? Did you reinstall windows? I know for sure the I can reinstall windows without formating. Cause I have done it once before.