Switching out Motherboards

[PricklyPete]

A friend of mine just had his motherboard go and he wants to replace it. The problem is he doesn't want to reinstall his operating system. What is the likelihood that he can switch out the motherboard with a similar motherboard (he had a KT133 board and he is going to switch it out with a KT133A board). He asked me if this would work because I normally know this stuff, but I have never run into this problem before where I didn't just go ahead and reinstall the OS. If anyone has experience with this, it would be greatly appreciated. One more thing, he is running Windows 2000 on his machine.

Thanks.

 

[Strych9]

Fresh install is always best.

 

[SOSTrooper]

The problem with Win2K can be pretty unpredictable on how it can handle a motherboard switch. On old NT4.0 OS, its almost 99% it'll do a blue screen when you first boot it up after a motherboard switch. I've worked on Win2K systems that run perfectly without a reinstall after a motherboard switch, but I've also worked on Win2K systems that go haywired (blue screens) after a switch. Since he is switching with a similar chipset board, I would say make sure he has the VIA 4in1 drivers installed before swapping out the boards.

 

[xSauronx]

oh dear god
i feel for him

replacing a mobo without a fresh install is pure hell, i think anad has a faq on it, but it mostly consists of uninstalling ALL hardware in the Device Manager, not rebooting while you do it, and then swapping boards

if it was me, id just back up all my data to a second hard drive or a CD-R and format the thing, its not worth the trouble youre gonna have to go through to get the damn thing to work with a new board and an old install

 

[PricklyPete]

I keep telling him to wait and we'll back up the stuff on to a second HD, but he is getting eager to fix it and he doesn't want to wait until I can help him with it and transfer the data...we'll see. Thanks for the input.

 

[Rhombuss]

I've done it before, especially from a BX chipset to a VIA694X .

All you really need to do is uninstall all chipset drivers, IDE controllers, and anything else handling IRC/ACPI functions.