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Swapping motherboards - What to do....

what operating system?

if it's windows 98 or win2k, you should go and delete all the 'system devices' out of device manager (you might need to do this in safe mode). these are all the things related to the motherboard.

then, install the new mobo, boot up, and windows will find all the new *stuff*

i've done this plenty of times. of course, if you run into any problems, you MIGHT need to do a re-install, so i'd make sure your important stuff is backed up before switching.
 
I was lucky, I swapped out motherboards and changed video cards without doing a single thing and everything worked fine. Took a couple of reboots to install everything, but everything detected. All I had to do was install a new video card driver.

I did this with Win98. Of course your mileage may vary. I would do like sohcrates suggested and remove all the system devices first.

--Ben
 
MAKE SURE you do a complete restorable backup (using Drive Image or
Ghost, for example) before doing the backup...You can never be
too paranoid about something going serious wrong in such a case.
The chances are, it'll be no more than a matter of waiting through
a few restarts and producing a couple of driver discs, but things
can go wrong and you need to have the chance of returning to the
start...

Also, as some have mentioned, delete basically everything under
the hardware list just before doing the swap.

Kwad
 
If you use sysprep from microsoft in your windows directory, you can force it to do PNP with w2k and you dont need to go through the routine of deleting everything using sysprep with ghost.

I do upgrades for thousands of machine remotely and every few hundred is different, so using sysprep you only need 1 image for all computer.. assuming all drivers are on the local drive.

You can also create a driver directory and have windows load the correct drivers.
 
forcesho is all over it, you go man.

With sysprep, don't you have to install the drive drivers before you switch? In other words if your ide or scsi ard needs special drivers, you must install them on your current system, run sysprep, and then install on new machine. If you don't I think you may not be able to access the drives, particularly the cdrom where you have to get the drivers from. This probably isn't a problem with standard IDE, but raid and some scsi cards aren't supported by MSs standard installs.
 
i never do major hardware swaps w/out reinstallation, but i have the luxury of a nice network backup location. stuff just doesnt seem to work right unless you reinstall...especially with win9x.

if your installing win2k on a scsi drive with a non-supplied driver...id just reinstall and press f8 (or whatever it is) and put in the driver disk. in the end it will prolly be less time spent and the result with be a more stable system.
 
I had to do it because i was pressed into it..

sysprep 1.1 - in microsoft's site
Here...

In non domain computer, it wont matter just for domain network it matters.. ie

clone 1 has user x and clone 2 has user y, if you run clone or switch mobo without giving it a new SID, user x may have access to drive Z but user y doesn't, without a new SID, they think it's the same user.

theres a option in the ini file, say your Adaptec 29160 has that oem string, you take that and put it into the sysprep.ini file

[SysPrepMassStorage]
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_1222 = "%windir%\inf\oem.inf"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2411 = "%windir%\inf\etc1.inf"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2412 = "%windir%\inf\etc2.inf"

there is also a PNP directory, etc.etc. where you can put like Drivers\MatroxVideo;Drivers\SBPCI; etc.etc.

This is good for multiple deployment with w2k. But u'll need ghost
 
Actually I do like to reinstall, fresh things but in w2k in a production domain with SID conflicting, it's not possible...
 
OTT ! you just boot into safe mode and let all the whirring do the work. hey presto! you reboot and things just work.
seen it done from AMD to intel boards and back again, the old AMD to new AMD, etc... both Win2K and ME
the way ME handles it is very time consuming because it will take 30 minutes to reinstall everything itself with plug'n'play
 
question, it seems like there should be some way to do this with hardware profiles...
i mean i realize i can use it to back up my current setup before i start removing everything. but is there some way to create a clean-slate-type hardware profile so you can just reboot with that one and have it find the new stuff

--Adam Stasiak
 
I'll be installing my RMA'd motherboard tomorrow, and from what I've been collecting from everyone here, the best way to do it would be to install all of my original components, boot up the machine, quickly go into safe mode, remove all the component, restart, and have windows detect everything. Does this sound good? Or am I missing something? There are a lot of files that I don't want to lose on my harddrive, such as term papers, midterm papers, essays, and of course, my 1000+ mp3s =).
 
palesius, I think that's what sysprep does, you have 1 image, enable the -PNP detect and copy it to other machines..
 
if its the exact same model board i don't see why you would need to change anything... nothing is different. just make sure you get all your pci bits in the same slots and would work just fine.
 
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