Swapping motherboards

[MrChipMuthabored]

I want to join the Asus bandwagon and swap my Biostar board with the A7V. Now my question is would I encounter any problems moving all of my other components on to a new motherboard? My instincts say there shouldn't be a problem, but I never swapped boards before.

Thanks!

 

[LXi]

There shouldnt be a problem, but its highly recommended that you clean reinstall Windows when swapping motherboards.

 

[btac]

Doing a clean install is always a safe bet but it aggravates me to reload everything. I've found that if I specify the hard drive specs in the bios the first time it boots, it finds the info on the hard drive fine and proceeds to rebuild everything on the board from the hard drive. Occasionally, one or two items get missed butproviding ou have the drivers, no big deal. If it doesn't work, hey, you tried.

 

[Plester]

try this - always works for me. before you make the move, start REGEDIT and delete the 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum' key - this holds all your hardware config info. shut down and make the swap. when you boot for the 1st time everything should be detected and drivers installed (if not and you check your device manager and it is empty - start the 'add new hardware wizard' and let windows detect. when its all done check your device manager - sometimes there will be double entries for certain devices - one with a yellow exclamation and one in good working order. if there are some of these then remove both the versions of each device and reboot - they will be detected and installed properly. good luck.

 

[NuovoTech]

Plester's method works, tho I would *add*...copy the Windows directory from your install CD to your HDD first. When first rebuilding DevMgr, your CDROM drive may not be accessable.

 

[Plester]

true, true, forgot to mention that. it's always a good idea to copy the win98 dir from the cd to your HD, even if you are doing a clean install, and tuck that cd away.

 

[Sundog]

Clean Install!!!

 

[Plester]

fyi. i use an old 2.1 gb drive with a basic install of win98 with the win98 dir from the cd on it, and the enum key deleted and just ghost to new drives in new systems, aka never do full fresh installs anymore - too time consuming - this method takes 10 minutes.