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Upgrading Motherbord...Format Hard Drive?

J

jetworek

Junior Member
Hello all,

I'm new to this forum and I could not find the answer looking around so I thought I would just ask.

I have a HP Pavillion computer that I have recently added a lot of stuff to and I'm having stability problems. The computer is about 1.5 years old and it had a 750 Athlon Processor, 128ram, cdrom, 32mg TNT2 agp card. Well, I have added 256mg more of ran, a couple PCI cards, a CDBurner, and a Geforece2 GTS 32mg video card. I started having a LOT of stability problems. Compter kept crashing when I would play my video games. Well, I had been wanting to upgrade to XP so I bought the full version of XP (figured I might be changing some things so I wanted the full version) and things became more stable...for about 2 weeks. Now I am having some of the stability probs again playing games.

I kinda figure that I am having a power supply problems and maybe some heat related problems. I think it is probably a power supply because when I looked at my current power supply it said (I might be wrong here) 185W. That seems WAY to low for a Athlon computer. So, I have decided that I want to buy a new case, motherboard, procesor, and Ram. I want to keep my drives because I am happy with them. I feel pretty comfortable (I think) putting the stuff together (I might try to find a barebones system so all I have to do is add my drives) but I am not sure about one thing. How do I reformat my hard drive so I can get rid of all the HP junk and start over with a clean install. When I installed XP I did not do the upgrade, rather I did the complete install but I still get the HP screen when I boot the compter-I guess this was setup by HP in the Mobo Bios?

Since I am now running XP do I just go to the 'my computer' 'hard drive' right click and select format?
Will this get rid of everything on my hard drive and allow me to reinstall XP once I put all my stuff in the new case? Do I even need to worry about reinstalling the OS...since I am using the same HD? I did not convert the hard drive to NTFS so I will probably do that when I reformat the hard drive. Also, would I do the reformat right before I take my compter apart?

I appreciate you help on this matter!

Jeff
 
I still get the HP screen when I boot the compter-I guess this was setup by HP in the Mobo Bios

Yeah, that is the BIOS splash screen.

I would definately reccomend a reinstall if you are swapping motherboards. One thing though, you said you got a new stick of ram. Ram can be flakey, ie, it works, but not stably. I would run memtest (read their FAQ to do it right) to make sure the ram is okay before proceeding. You don't want to buy a new mobo only to have the same stability problems. Cancel out the ram first, then go ahead and buy new stuff (if you still want to). If you find that the memory is bad then you can exchange it w/ your vendor.
If your power supply has been cutting it up till now then it might not be the problem. I would look at the ram first in any case because that is new.
If you want to format your hard drive before an install, just boot off of the XP CD and then when it starts setup, it will give you the optoin of partitioning and formatting, pick which partition you want to install on (I gather it will be c: ) and then tell it to format it when it asks.
 
This is from Anandtech FAQ's and MS's KB.Anandtech's/Modus's verbose FAQ's regarding Upgrading Motherboard

I've taken the liberty of posting the Readers Digest version regarding XP. This will also work with W2K.


Shut down, install your new Motherboard, power on, and enter your system BIOS. Make sure your First Boot Device is set to CDROM. Insert the Win XP setup CD and boot from this disk. (You may have to "press a key to boot from CD" as the prompt says.) Skip the initial prompt asking to repair your existing installation. Then proceed to the screen where you select a partition, and choose your existing Windows partition. Setup will detect your existing installation and ask you to repair. Say yes. When Windows Setup is complete, you should have a fully working installation with all your old user and application profiles. Everything should be intact except your old HAL (Hardware Extraction Layer) which will have been replaced by the repair/new install.

I've used this technique everytime I've replaced a Motherboard on a system using Win XP and it has yet to fail me.
 
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