Reinstall windows? or PLUG N PRAY!!!! YEA!

[jd254]

I'm going from Asus P5Q-SE to Asus P5N-D... since the chipsets are completely different, I might as well as reinstall windows completely right? but... they're asus... and they're box looks soooooo similar... wouldn't a plug n pray be a "lets give it a shot" moment?

hehe i just checked out my sig and I jsut realized I went from P5N-T Deluxe to P5Q-SE and now back to a P5N-D...

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

I have changed from one Asus board to another with different chip sets and not had to reinstall but, they were different boards than yours. Give it a try.

 

[jjmIII]

If the boxes look the same, shouldn't be a problem .

BTW: AYWAYS RE-INSTALL!!!

 

[Deathhorse]

There's always a chance it will work and will not work. I moved an entire hdd to a different computer with no problems. But other times i had bsod on startup after changing the drive. I would just back the stuff up and format it. Probably get better performance too.

 

[Gillbot]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=265026

Win7 seems to be MUCH better at the plug-n-pray method than XP but it's still a crapshoot.

 

[adamantinepiggy]

If you copy all the new motherboard's driver install files to the existing Windows install before changing the motherboard (much better with Win7 than Xp, but often still works), you have a decent chance of getting everything working just fine as long as you can boot into windows safe mode at minimum. It'll likely have lots of unknown devices, but that's OK as long as you can get into Windows. You have to have the driver install files ready to go in some accessible folder because it's likely that most of the stuff like network, external drives, USB devices, etc wont be working so getting install files through those methods wont work if they are not already copied to the boot drive. Already having them in some desktop folder allows you to get to them as long as Windows can see the boot drive which it will be able to if Windows can boot.

Install chipset drivers first, and as long as this goes OK, the other drivers should all install without issue.

It's still a crapshoot, but this method has worked for me many times in the past.

 

[Iron Woode]

If you copy all the new motherboard's driver install files to the existing Windows install before changing the motherboard (much better with Win7 than Xp, but often still works), you have a decent chance of getting everything working just fine as long as you can boot into windows safe mode at minimum. It'll likely have lots of unknown devices, but that's OK as long as you can get into Windows. You have to have the driver install files ready to go in some accessible folder because it's likely that most of the stuff like network, external drives, USB devices, etc wont be working so getting install files through those methods wont work if they are not already copied to the boot drive. Already having them in some desktop folder allows you to get to them as long as Windows can see the boot drive which it will be able to if Windows can boot.

Install chipset drivers first, and as long as this goes OK, the other drivers should all install without issue.

It's still a crapshoot, but this method has worked for me many times in the past.

its not just a driver issue.

HAL has been changed and that will prevent windows from booting up even into safe-mode.

I just do a repair install when that happens with XP.

Win 7 is better at this type of upgrade.

 

[jjmIII]

Hmmm, I repair pc's for people on the side. I guess backing up and re-installing gets easier the more you do it. I could not imagine trying to jump through a bunch of hoops to avoid a re-install that in the end most likely would perform better.

 

[ElFenix]

i've got a computer that has gone from an athlon 64 to 3 different intel processors all on different chipsets and then to an athlon 64x2 and then to a quad core athlon 2, all without reinstalling windows. no notable issues, other than having to fix the intel processor driver thing when going from intel --> AMD. no installing drivers or removing hardware from device manager prior to, or anything. shutdown, remove old motherboard and processor, install new motherboard and processor, and boot.

honestly, going from red team to green team or vice versa for video cards seems more likely to screw up your system.

reinstalling windows is for suckers.


edit: brag thread

 

[Gillbot]

i've got a computer that has gone from an athlon 64 to 3 different intel processors all on different chipsets and then to an athlon 64x2 and then to a quad core athlon 2, all without reinstalling windows. no notable issues, other than having to fix the intel processor driver thing when going from intel --> AMD. no installing drivers or removing hardware from device manager prior to, or anything. shutdown, remove old motherboard and processor, install new motherboard and processor, and boot.

honestly, going from red team to green team or vice versa for video cards seems more likely to screw up your system.

reinstalling windows is for suckers.


edit: brag thread

I have a machine that's on an XP install from early 2002. It's been through uncountable hardware changes back and forth from Intel and AMD numerous times. It IS possible to do so but it wasn't always an easy migration.

 

[Absolution75]

The toughest thing to get working is the SATA/ATA driver working.


You can sometimes be clever though. My old machine would bluescreen in both ACHI/IDE mode when I changed the MB (trying to load AMD's driver on an Intel board). The mb's shared the same extra SATA device (some jmicron crap for external/1 internal drive). I put the windows drive on the jmicron device and it booted fine, installed the new real Intel SATA drivers and moved it back over to the real controller


You can also install drivers manually by editing the registry, but I wouldn't recommend it lol.

 

[Gillbot]

The toughest thing to get working is the SATA/ATA driver working.


You can sometimes be clever though. My old machine would bluescreen in both ACHI/IDE mode when I changed the MB (trying to load AMD's driver on an Intel board). The mb's shared the same extra SATA device (some jmicron crap for external/1 internal drive). I put the windows drive on the jmicron device and it booted fine, installed the new real Intel SATA drivers and moved it back over to the real controller


You can also install drivers manually by editing the registry, but I wouldn't recommend it lol.

Yep, that's usually the toughest part is keeping the proper boot partition without having to do a repair install or something. Especially when migrating from different brands or chipsets.

 

[jd254]

If the boxes look the same, shouldn't be a problem .

BTW: AYWAYS RE-INSTALL!!!

lol but the boxes look exactly the same!!!

i've got a computer that has gone from an athlon 64 to 3 different intel processors all on different chipsets and then to an athlon 64x2 and then to a quad core athlon 2, all without reinstalling windows. no notable issues, other than having to fix the intel processor driver thing when going from intel --> AMD. no installing drivers or removing hardware from device manager prior to, or anything. shutdown, remove old motherboard and processor, install new motherboard and processor, and boot.

honestly, going from red team to green team or vice versa for video cards seems more likely to screw up your system.

reinstalling windows is for suckers.


edit: brag thread

omg lol I think I'll just backup all my steam files and reinstall. I do this so much for everyone else... I just feel like I'm killing my computer when I reinstall!!! (ignore my psycho self) All my data is on a separate hard drive anyways...

 

[RavenSEAL]

Eh...Motherboards, regardless of manufacturer are not PnP. The only OS in which MBs work as PnP is Ubuntu/Debian.

 

[WaTaGuMp]

When my P5K-E went bad recently, I went from a P35 to a P45 chipset. I was able to boot up and run just fine, installed the P45 drivers and everything was ok. Even after doing that, I did a fresh install, just wanted to see if it would work. So it is possible.

 

[leptooners]

I'm in the same situation as you. Unfortunately, I didn't have a windows disk that worked available to me so I just attempted to switch the hard drive over and it worked to my surprise. I just installed all the new chipset's drivers and it works great. I think it helped that the OS on the hard drive I was switching over had very recently been installed, though.

 

[birthdaymonkey]

I recently upgraded from an old ASUS 690G mobo a newer Gigabyte 785 unit. Plug'n'pray worked flawlessly, but then I noticed some issues with DXVA hardware assisted video playback (choppy movement, dropped frames). Of course I immediately blamed the messy install and proceeded to do a clean one.

Turns out the problem was a known issue with the nVidia 260.99 drivers, not the motherboard's fault at all. However, I did learn an important lesson about myself: As soon as something went the slightest bit fishy on my system, I was going to blame the plug'n'pray upgrade.

In the future I'll be performing clean installs in a motherboard upgrade situation because it's just not worth the niggling voice in the back of my mind telling me that my install isn't as "perfect" as it could be. My Comp-OCD will never be satisfied with a plug'n'pray install.

 

[86waterpumper]

This is the part that would bother me, what birthdaymonkey said...no matter how good it seemed to work, you would always have bits and pieces of the old hardware in the system registry...and that would bug me to death