Swapping out motherboard and processor-do I really need to reformat my hard drives?

  • Thread starter Thread starter rred_
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rred_

My weekend project is going to be finally retiring the wife's Pentium
II and replacing it with a 3 Ghz Penitum 4 . I was talking to a
co-worker and he said you have to reformat the hard drive(s) when you
replace the motherboard. Is this true? Why?
 
My weekend project is going to be finally retiring the wife's Pentium
II and replacing it with a 3 Ghz Penitum 4 . I was talking to a
co-worker and he said you have to reformat the hard drive(s) when you
replace the motherboard. Is this true? Why?
Click to expand...

Because Windows won't be able to start properly with the new hardware.

Sometimes you can swap without any trouble. Sometimes a repair installation
after the swap will be fine.

Just do a backup of all your data and try. Moving from a P2 to a P4 I would
be willing to bet that it won't start.

You also don't mention what OS you are using. DOS will be just fine... : )
 
It is not necessary to reformat the hard drive with Win98 or WinNT. Uninstall the video driver before you remove the hard drive from the old PC. When you start with the drive in the new PC windows will find new hardware and attempt to install drivers. Most drivers e.g. for the I/O ports will install automatically. You will probably have to supply drivers for some devices e.g. video. I have not tried this with WinXP and have seen some posts saying it is not possible.
 
You will likely have to reload the OS but I would not go so far as to
reformat. My likely course of action would be a fresh install onto the
same HD as your current OS but leave the file system intact. This will
overwrite the windows directory but other data will remain. Of course,
many programs will have to be reinstalled but some will still just
work wih settings intact. Of course, you should back up this drive
before doing this. Your question indicates multiple hard drives. If
this is the case, here is absolutely no need to format any other drive.
 
WHENEVER you change the motherboard in a computer where the harddrive had
Windows on it, then after changing out the motherboard you MUST reformat the
harddrive and do a fresh install of the OS. Otherwise you can look forward
to ongoing Registry errors and nasty data corruption.
 
I agree with DaveW. While Windows might boot fine, there will be tons
of problems in the long run. The best solution is to reformat and
install Windows fresh. (Back up your data first, of course! And make a
note of what apps you want to install once you're done). The registry
will not be friendly, and you may face numerous problems with software
and data corruption, in addition to things just plain not working as
intended down the road. Also, in my experience, installing a fresh copy
of Windows over an existing install is useless. There are usually
remnants left over from the old install that interact with the new one
and cause problems. You can try it, but in my experience, even if it
"works", your best option is to start from scratch.
Jeff
 
Update:

Thanks for all the helpful replies. I decided to not screw around with
it and just reformatted both hard drives (I backed both up on my newly
purchased 200 Gb portable HD-how did I ever live without one of
these??). There was a lot of crap on both that had built up over the
last 6-8 years anyway, so it kind of feels good to have nice fresh HDs.
Of course I ran into trouble with the DVD drive not being rcognized by
the motherboard, weird thing is the HD that was the master on the IDE
wasn't seen either. Still haven't solved that one, everything works
fine with a CD burner hooked up instead of the DVD drive. Oh, and yes
I did remember to hook up the power to the drive when I tried the DVD.

BTW, the DVD drive is a Pioneer DVD-114, which there is almost zero
useful information for on the net. I haven't been able to find squat
about this problem anywhere, so if you have ideas throw em at me!

Again thanks to everyone for their input.
 
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