"No hassle" swap of mainboard

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rick Bryan
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R

Rick Bryan

Good evening.

I'm replacing a broken P4P800 SE mainboard with an exact duplicate, and
I'm hoping if I reinstall all the connectors and drives and cards onto
the new board exactly the same way they came off, Windows XP will boot
without a problem.

If I have to reformat and reinstall the OS and drivers and everything
else it's going to take an entire weekend, as I'm sure you know.

Is there any chance the OS will boot, even if in safe mode, or do you
think Win XP (or perhaps the HDD (?)) "knows" this isn't the same
mainboard and will refuse to boot?

Rick Bryan
New York, NY
 
You have a 50/50 chance
people who have replaced mobo with the same mobo have had varied success.
If you have trouble booting you do not need to format and reinstall.....you
just need to do a repair installation.
If you have SP2 installed the original XP CD will be rejected the error
message will say you trying to replace newer files with older files.The
workaround is to slipstream SP2 into XP.
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp
peterk
 
Rick said:
Good evening.

I'm replacing a broken P4P800 SE mainboard with an exact duplicate, and
I'm hoping if I reinstall all the connectors and drives and cards onto
the new board exactly the same way they came off, Windows XP will boot
without a problem.

If I have to reformat and reinstall the OS and drivers and everything
else it's going to take an entire weekend, as I'm sure you know.

Is there any chance the OS will boot, even if in safe mode, or do you
think Win XP (or perhaps the HDD (?)) "knows" this isn't the same
mainboard and will refuse to boot?

Rick Bryan
New York, NY
Click to expand...

I've done this a couple of times now from entirely different
(chipsets/makes) AMD boards with SP2 - no problems at all that I can
see. I have read that the chances are improved if you boot to safe mode
(F8 on boot) first. I just plugged and hoped, and it worked.

Rob
 
If you can, take an image of the drive first. Otherwise make sure you backup
your data.
Repair installs are the correct way to transition from one motherboard to
another - of different mobo or CPU chipset etc.
Repair installs are safe.

I suggest you go over to www.michaelstevenstech.com and have a read there
about repairs.

There are some gotchas with big name brand systems that come with recovery
partitions - they are sometimes BIOS locked to a specific BIOS
motherboard-ID (not version) = motherboard. However in your case this should
not be an issue since the board is the same make and model (but perhaps
different revision and different bios version).

Having a regression step and understanding what you are doing is the best
way to succeed, so do a quick read around. Some will say to never do a
repair - ignore them (esp. DaveW who posts here) - this is bad advice.

Make sure you have all media at hand including device drivers, motherboard
CD, XP license key, and so on.

Safe mode may help - the most common reason apart from BIOS locks for repair
failure is virus and spyware infection.
If somehow you could scan the disc prior to the repair then cautiously
remove any spyware / viruses you may be better off. However in this case
proceed cautiously esp. if a system file is infected.

Disconnect the internet before you start and make sure you do not reconnect
it until you either have XP SP2 installed or a firewall up and running. Note
that you may have to reactivate your XP install.

HTH
- Tim
 
Rick Bryan said:
If I have to reformat and reinstall the OS and drivers and everything
else it's going to take an entire weekend, as I'm sure you know.
Click to expand...

You can use Windows XP installation CD to repair your existing install
if you can't boot from HD after changing the motherboard. Well, you
might want to create an installation CD with SP2 on it, this is called
slipstreaming. There's plenty of information about the procedure
available and even a program to automate the task for you.

The repair system is pretty good. I haven't had to reinstall XP since
I initially installed it, even though I've changed motherboards twice,
both times to completely different boards with different chipsets, VIA
to SiS and back again.
 
This may be a little late. Just note all of the bios settings and match them on
the new board before booting the first time and you shouldn't run into any
problems.
 
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