Vista - don't expect to be able to change motherboard without reinstalling Windows

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: HardWired
Wow...such problems. My mobo swapout w/ Vista went smooth like butter. No RAID or anything other than vanilla plain setup with 1 IDE HDD and DVD writer so maybe thats why it went so smooth, but on my least powerful machine I had a Asus P4PE slowly dying (onboard sound died, NIC acting funny, etc) and I replaced it with an Abit IS7. The only thing I did pre removal and before shutting down Vista was to go to Device Manager and select Uninstall for all the items listed under System Devices, Storage Controllers, and IDE Controllers.

It took maybe two minutes with a lot of mouse clicking but once that was done I powered down, did the swapout and rebooted. To my utter surprise not only did I boot to the desktop but Vista then went through and found every single resource for the new Abit mobo and after a bunch of HDD activity (maybe two/three minutes) I did a reboot and its like it never missed a beat. Its been a couple of months since I did that and I keep up on 3 computers in the house so I don't remember if I had to go back and do a little tweaking (new onboard NIC driver, etc) but other than that, I was shocked at how smooth it went.

Believe it or not...

I believe it. Right on!

It does work sometimes; I've done it myself during Disaster Recovery scenarios. On the failed ones 9/10 times a repair will get it going too. The right attitude to have about it is, "This ain't gonna work and I'm ready for that. If it does I'll be happy!"

There are things you can do ahead of time that will also increase your chances. Filter drivers can be Stop 7B hell so getting them removed beforehand will help a ton. Get rid of Burning software, antivirus, and disk related software like dell Perc utilities, any open file backup drivers like veritas otman.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: asdfqwertyuiop
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. If I turn off my PC and change my SATA mode from IDE to AHCI, it's not changing during boot. It's changed. Windows could deal with it surely. It's not changed in the middle of the boot process.

By ?middle of the boot process? I?m referring to a change that affects the boot process. Changing a printer driver, adding a program, enabling/disabling an ?automatic? type service are not involved in the boot. If something goes wrong with those you still have a functional OS and you have a shot at fixing it.
Changing ?boot? drivers (start type 0 services) must be done very carefully. The boot sequence is ?brittle? as you put it.

Would you expect standard IDE drivers to be able to work with an SATA controller? Of course not, or we wouldn?t need SATA drivers at all. When you flip your bios from IDE to AHCI you have, as far as the booting OS knows, removed an IDE controller and installed a SATA controller. It will continue to try to use the IDE drivers which will fail. Remember, there is NO plug and play going on at boot. You may very well have the driver components sitting right there in windows\inf and system32\drivers but the OS will have no way to go looking for them at boot time.
Completely swapping a mobo is the same sort of thing. You may have jumped from nVidia SATA drivers to Silicon Images, or heck the PCI bridge that the SATA controller is connected to may have changed. Windows will PnP all day long and get things corrected as best it can once you are booted but if you?ve monkeyed with something that?s needed to get booting? Asking for trouble.

That's cool. So when Intel release working drivers that don't cause data corruption, I install them and enable it in the BIOS and Windows will work..... Bit of a pain in the mean time having a truly redundant disk.

Install them shut down, enable in bios and boot. With working drivers you might be ok. Maybe, maybe not. If it still gives you trouble do a repair which kicks off the setup process and pretty much rebuilds everything in the system hive. This won?t goof up anything in the software hive where all your 3rd party programs are installed.
Be prepared for it not to work though. Have backups. There are a thousand other variables that come in to play here. The supported method for swapping hardware is to go through the install process then restore data.

 

[Matt1970]

Originally posted by: Shawn
I don't know who told you that it would work but that's just crazy. Always reinstall when you change the motherboard. It's a pain but it'll save you from tons of headaches later.

I couldn't agree more. That has been the rule of thumb since windows 95.