Switching out Motherboards Msi Turbo with K7t266 Pro2 (question) Please Help :)

[CorCentral]

I recently upgraded my Motherboard from an MSI K7t Turbo to an MSI K7T266 Pro2 .

Can I just switch out Motherboards & ram & startup ? Or do I have to do something else beforehand ?

Current Setup :

Win2000 Pro
K7t Turbo
512mb Mushkin rev1.5 pc133
SB Live
Elsa Gladiac 32mb GTS
WD 40 gb hd

Very soon to be setup (waiting on ram)

Win2000 Pro
K7t266 Pro2
512mb High Perf. pc2100 ddr
Same videocard as above (soon to upgrade that as well)
SB Live
Same WD HD as above .

Thanks for any help

 

[Jayczar]

Always be leary of swapping out mobos without doing a clean OS install.
But, since they are both VIA chipsets and you are running Win 2k you
may get by OK. Just make sure your BIOS settings are the same.
Good luck!

 

[CorCentral]

What usually happens when you do this kind of switch with the chipsets not being the same ?

I'm just worried about the data on my Hard Drive ............... :Q


I know I've seen this question before but cannot find it the search .

 

[Jayczar]

This is definitely not a procedure you want to do without backing
up your data. Anything like an IRQ or a BIOS setting that is different could
cause your system to crash and if you damage or corrupt the NT kernel
on 2k all hope may be lost unless you know how to fix it.
The thing that is nice with having the VIA chipset on both boards is
that the 4-1 drivers are essentially universal for all VIA chipsets now.
I guess the best thing to do if you are determined to do this is to
uninstall of your hardware drivers then swap boards.

 

[CorCentral]

Any other things I should know ?

 

[Ionizer86]

Step #1 (Do not skip) Burn all your data to CD-R disks or transfer the data to a network HDD.

The above step is critical if you haven't backed up yet. If you have no burner/ network, doing multiple partitions is good also, since your data is much safer on a partition other than C: if your OS corrupts with the upgrade.

Although you may want to swap boards with the same HDD, I'd reformat. I'm replacing my MSI K7T Turbo Lite with an EPoX 8KHA+ soon. I see this as a very good chance to reformat the system, and to get myself a fresh start. I wouldn't simply switch boards and hope that drivers work.

Once, I took a backup drive with an OS installed, and hooked it up to another system as the boot drive (essentially switcing mobo/cpu while maintaining drive). As soon as the OS booted, it started loading all the drivers for the new board, chipset, and CPU. The display drivers were gone. I don't know what the OS did to the old mobo drivers; they may not have been uninstalled cleanly. So I'd still go with a reformat.

 

[Wind]

U should be able to swap w/o much hassle. I believe Win2k will detect the new mobo & the necessary drivers. But backin up important data is a must (safety).

 

[Egrimm]

I did the same a month ago: changed my old MSI K7T Turbo Raid for a MSI K7T Pro2 RU without reinstalling Win2000. It all worked well, except for me getting lower scores in benchmarks than I had hoped (not that much lower though), but a couple of weeks ago Win2000 had some trouble starting. After repairing it it worked fine, but a week ago wouldn't start even when I repaired it. After I formatted the C drive and reinstalled Windows everything works fine now and the benchmarks are as high as they should be.
So even though you might save some time by not reinstalling Win2000 now you'll probably have to do it sooner or later.

 

[CorCentral]

Just an update : Over the holidays I did the switch with no problems .................. all running smooth

 

[Wind]