Win 7 and upgrade Mother Board

[NJLOAD]

Folks, pretty much updating the whole rig except hard drives. If I replace the mother board and CPU along with memory and power supply will windows 7 Professional 64bit give me an issue when the power is turned back on? I'm upgrading from AMD dual core and AMD mother board to Intel I7 and Asus board with RipJaw 16 gig of ram. Power supply is 700w unit.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[Bubbaleone]

Have your Asus drivers CD and your Windows retail (not OEM or recovery) installation DVD ready, because you'll need to run a Windows repair installation to make your existing installation bootable with the new hardware. Also, because of the major hardware change, you'll probably need to reactivate Windows. :thumbsup:

 

[Binky]

Whatever you do, make an image of the OS before you shut down and take it apart.

 

[NJLOAD]

What will happen when you power back up with the new electronics? What will the image of the OS accomplish? Sorry but never updated electronics and tried to use the same Hard Drives. Just trying to understand the chain of events.

 

[SimMike2]

The reason you image your drive is in case of a bad scenario, you can simply put in your old parts and reimage your drive back to your hard drive. It is a safety backup. You should also run the Windows Easy Transfer utility and backup everything to a different hard drive. This way you are covering all your backup bases. You are making a pretty dramatic change, so you might need to do a clean install anyway, which makes the Easy Transfer backup a convenient way to get your setting and files back on the drive. Either way you will need to reactivate for sure and also reinstall your programs.

 

[Bubbaleone]

Folks, pretty much updating the whole rig except hard drives. If I replace the mother board and CPU along with memory and power supply will windows 7 Professional 64bit give me an issue when the power is turned back on? I'm upgrading from AMD dual core and AMD mother board to Intel I7 and Asus board with RipJaw 16 gig of ram. Power supply is 700w unit.

Any help is appreciated.

NJLOAD, I got to thinking about my reply to your query...did some serious investigation work, and testing. I was completely wrong. It's no longer possible to perform an in-place repair installation in Vista and Windows 7, as it was in XP, for the purpose of hardware migration.

Microsoft changed the installation process from a file based (2000, 2003, XP) to an image based (Vista, 2008, Win7) mechanism and is, apparently, indifferent to this loss of functionality.

I sincerely apologize to you and any other Forum reader, and now have the correct information for you regarding Win7 system migration to different hardware.

The cheapest, and proven, option I found to migrate your system to different hardware is Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Workstation (Standalone) software with Universal Restore.

I checked the Acronis website and found this:

http://www.acronis.com/backup-recovery/workstation/#overview

That's good until the end of December. For that price, and a free universal restore license, I jumped on it. Here's a description of Universal Restore from Acronis:

(What happens when a system’s hardware fails or needs to be retired? How do you move the valuable applications and data to a new system or hardware after disaster strikes? How do you quickly restore a system after the hardware has changed?

Acronis solves this common issue with Acronis® Backup & Recovery™ 11 Universal Restore™, a fully integrated module that restores servers or workstations to different hardware or to a virtual machine, providing highly flexible disaster recovery and migration options.

The Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Universal Restore module prepares you for even the most unforeseen events without requiring administrators to purchase and maintain identical spare machines.

The process begins when Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 is used to create a transportable image that disassociates the data from the old machine’s underlying hardware. Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Universal Restore loads in the new hardware’s own drivers so that the image from the previous hardware platform will allow the machine to be flawlessly restored to a different hardware platform, complete with operating system, applications, data and all previous settings. Recovery can be implemented to an existing system, to a new system with different hardware, or to a virtual machine, in minutes, by following these steps:

• Boot your replacement system with Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 bootable media you have created and select ‘Recovery’ in the menu.
• Select the image to restore.
• Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Universal Restore then initiates the restore process, detects the hardware and installs the appropriate drivers for Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL).
• The result is a perfectly functioning system on a new hardware platform.

Top Features

• Recover — Recover a failed system to different hardware or to virtual machines in minutes after unforeseen events.
• Migrate — Complete physical-virtual, virtual-physical, physical-physical, or virtual-virtual migrations for system recovery, testing, and other purposes.
• Fix – load new hardware drivers and replace HAL to make system bootable after replacing hardware such as motherboard or storage controller or moving HDD to another machine.
• Clone and deploy — Clone and deploy operating systems with complete hardware independence)

After I got it installed on my system last night, thoroughly read the PDF manual, and burned the Acronis Bootable CD, I did some testing to try and duplicate your situation. I installed Win7 Ultimate x86 to a spare hard drive on my test machine. Then I installed that hard drive into my server.

I had to burn a CD with my server's sata/raid controllers, and NIC drivers but you should be able to use the Asus drivers CD that came with your mobo.The following Acronis article is the one I followed exactly:

"21327: Acronis Backup & Recovery 11: Fix Bootability with Acronis Universal Restore"

http://kb.acronis.com/content/21327

The migration was sucessful: system bootable with all data and programs intact. I had to manually reinstall all PnP drivers. I highly suggest that you very thoroughly read the Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Workstation manual, and the above article, until you really understand the process, requirements, and limitations (eg., universal restore does not install PnP drivers) if you decide to attempt this.

A final note: The Win7 installation DVD contains a very useful set of recovery tools that includes:

• Startup Repair: Automatically fix problems that are preventing Windows from starting.
• System Restore: Restore Windows to an earlier point in time.
• System Image Recovery: Recover your computer using a system image you created earlier.
• Windows Memory Diagnostic: Check your computer for memory hardware errors.
• Command Prompt: Open a command prompt window.

Just keep in mind that these tools are for working with the system (or system image) as it was installed on your existing hardware. Unfortunately none of these tools will enable you migrating your old hard drive, containing a working Win7 installation, to different computer hardware and have it be bootable with programs intact.

Regards,

Bubbaleone

 

[NJLOAD]

Bubbaleone, i have Acronis True Image Home 2010 with an upgrade option to 2012. I haven't looked the upgrade over yet but it looks like it might be able to do the same thing. Example copied from the site: Take your Acronis experience to the next level with our special Plus Pack add-on. This gives you advanced features, such as dynamic-disk support and Universal Restore, which lets you recover your entire system on a computer with a completely different architecture.

Any ideas on this?

 

[Meghan54]

Honestly, if you're just upgrading everything except the hard drive with its Win 7 install, just assemble the parts then boot the thing. You'll probably be surprised that Win 7 can handle a complete change of parts without having a seizure.

My Win 7 Ultimate install has been through 4 motherboards and 4 cpus....an i5 750, then i7 920 then a SB 2500k and then 2600k, with both SB setups on different motherboards....and never had a problem outside specific drivers for specific devices peculiar to a particular motherboard, such as audio drivers. Otherwise, the OS simply restarted each and every time.

 

[NJLOAD]

Was actually thinking about trying that but after i clone the drive 1st, just to be sure.

 

[NJLOAD]

Ok, got the new system up and running and when I hooked up my existing drive and booted up, I got the insert Win disk and repair. I didn't go forward for fear of losing information. Guess I need to look into the Acronis route.

I'll post back when I move forward.

 

[NJLOAD]

No luck yet with Acronis 2012 Home with Universal restore. My drive was Vista Ultimate upgraded to Win 7 Pro, and for some reason doing the universal restore it is looking for some vista drivers and neither the original vista disk or the Win 7 disk can bring this drive back to life with the new board. Not much faith in Acronis at this point. Also no luck doing a repair with the Win 7 disk either.

 

[CU]

I had to set my SATA drives to AHCI in the BIOS as they were defaulted to IDE when I did a MB change. I also made sure my HD controller drivers were using the default SATA AHCI Windows drivers before I changed MB's.

 

[NJLOAD]

gave up on Acronis was a waste of time. did a clean install on the new board and I'm slowly installing everything I had on the old drive, probably a good thing to do in the long run.

 

[Ketchup]

In my experience, Windows will only allow hardware changes that are similar to what you had. For example, if you go from Intel chipset to Intel you are fine, Intel to nvidia, and you will probably have to re-install everything. This also applies if the chipset you are upgrading to was released after Windows 7 (but not guaranteed.)

The best advice, as mentioned previously, is to be prepared for the worst, but hope for the best.

 

[Binky]

If you had a clean image from before booting on the new system, you could always restore it and start from there again.