Mike Youngblood said:
My Dell Dimension is now four years old. It only has a
Pentium II onboard. I want to purchase a new tower case,
a motherboard w/Pentium 4 @ 3GHz and a high end graphics
and sound card. I then plan to remove all the drives
(two hard drives, floppy drive and DVD drive from my
current Dell box and install them in the new box with the
new motherboard, graphics & video card.
My question is, will I have problems with XP home edition
when I boot my computer after having installed the boot
drive in the new system?
Hi Mike,
In addition to the excellent advice from Carey Frisch, I'll take this
opportunity to recycle a post I made here recently in response to a very
similar question:
Windows XP can cope with most changes of hardware, as long as it can boot to
the desktop (and from there run the "found new hardware" wizard). About the
only thing that will STOP it booting to the desktop is a change of IDE
controller. It has to "know about" the new IDE controller before it'll boot.
Otherwise it'll boot only so far, and then give a Blue Screen Of Death (aka
"STOP Error").
So.. what you have to do to add support for the new IDE controller is to
stick a small key into the Registry whilst running on the old board, i.e
BEFORE you swap to the new board.
The details of the change are here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314082
Specifically, for an Intel chipset based system using the ICH5 IDE
controller in non-RAID mode, save the lines below (between but not including
the "===") to your desktop as "IDE.reg" and then double-click the file to
merge it into the registry. No harm will be done if your chosen chipset is
NOT Intel.
===
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\
pci#ven_8086&dev_24DB]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="intelide"
===
I have used this fix myself on several occasions and found it to be
invariably successful. As ever, though, results cannot be guaranteed, so I
recommend you back up your data before doing the swap. The good news is that
even if this fix DOESN'T work, you should still be able to boot Windows back
on the old motherboard, i.e "back to square one".
If you're changing your graphics card, NIC or soundcard, it might also be an
idea to remove the drivers for the old card(s) before swapping to the new
board - just in case they cause a conflict with the new items.
If you're moving to an Intel chipset, then after getting XP booting on your
new hardware, don't forget to install the Intel Chipset .INF update so that
all chipset devices are detected:
http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/inf/inf.htm
If you have any further questions, feel free to message me (I'm on MSN
messenger, remove the spam blocker from my e-mail address).
Hope this helps.
