Motherboard Upgrade Woes

[dmccr]

Since you have 30 days to add/remove hardware before forced to "activate," I made the mistake of installing to a system using a motherboard which I now need to replace.

I'd be moving from a VIA chipset to an Intel chipset. When I try to boot on the new motherboard, it fails to use the new IDE controller, so blue-screens before it even has the chance to re-detect and activate the Intel drivers.

Any suggestions?

The MS Knowledgebase has a difficult-to-follow article advocating installing XP "clean" on another drive, then migrating the existing installation to that drive. Looks complicated to me, and I'd really LIKE to avoid wiping my current installation and starting fresh. (I know that would be cleaner, but I've not got the time).

Thanks in advance!

 

[Lonman]

I strongly recommend you make the time. If you don't and manage to get things running, any consequent problems will always leave you in doubt - (is something "old" causing this). I know it's a pain, but a motherboard swap is the largest hardware change you could make and getting it to take will take many more hours of tinkering then a clean install would.

Additionally, you can activate your copy of XP as many times as you want. If you really don't have the time right now, just put the old m/b back in and activate XP. The time spent at a future date to reactivate because you updated your system will probably require a phone call at most.

 

[mavis]

Lonman is right. I too changed my mobo AFTER installing WinXP - except I did a reformat and clean install, and as a result, haven't experienced any problems.

Make the time 🙂

mavis

 

[gothic]

I concur. Having recently upgraded mainboard and chip, I tried to just upgrade the relevant drivers, but this gave me no end of problems, one re-install later and all is paradise.

 

[dmccr]

Well, I'm biting the bullet and following everyone's advice. In migrating from "old" XP install to "new" XP install, I was planning to try the file and settings migration wizard. Anyone want to warn me against doing so? Any tips or problems I should expect?

Thanks again!

 

[Lonman]

I've never tried it so i can't even tell you if it works. Give it a shot and tell us what you think about it.

 

[dmccr]

So far, so good. As far as I can tell it does a pretty good job of migrating the settings, standard document locations, and whichever files/folders you specify under "advanced."

The only clear failure thus far was moving my Outlook Express information. My wife and I use the same XP profile (we don't log onto Windows as different users).

To separate our email accounts, we have long used the OE "Identity" function.

The XP "migration wizard" seemed to move Her identity but not mine. It created another identity titled "Main (2)" which I thought might be MY identity. As it turns out, BOTH identities were EMPTY... no messages etc.

Fortunately, I had already discovered ebackup (www.inachis.com) which did a perfect job of backing up on the old system and restoring on the new system. It did not retain the mail account PASSWORDS, which we let OE keep track of. That was somewhat of an inconvenience, since we'd not used the passwords in two years, but at least we got all the mail/folders/etc.

The XP wizard might do a fine job with a single OE identity, but it definitely choked on my two.

Regards,
Dean

 

[boxman]

The only way to fly with a new mobo/proc is a clean reinstall. Didn't even try to boot XP when i got my new board. Format NTFS!