Swapping motherboards, VIA -> Nforce2 question

[khanibal]

Was orginally running a soyo dragon ultra kt333 motherboard, but just a few days ago I had an accident and the board burn up. (heh). Anyway, I'm in the market for a new board that is stable and fast. I came across Soltek's golden flame board. I liked how it look and it recieved some high rating across various sites. I ordered one and it's on it's way as I type this. Now anyway, my question:


My harddrive. Loaded with just about everything in my life. I lose this and I'm basically screwed. Since I'm going to be installing a new board with a Nforce2 chipset from a Via chipset, is it a MUST to reformat? It didn't slip my mind that my harddrive has via drivers on it when I ordered the board, but when I think about it even if I did remember that, I wouldn't have gone Via again.

Is there a chance that I can just pop the new board in, boot everything up, remove the via's and install the nforce2 drivers? I'm using windows xp home if it helps. Thanks in advance, cheers! :beer:

[chris4521]

you shouldnt have to reformat. i went from a kt333 --> nforce2 without a reformat. i'd suggest you get that stuff backed up and reformat in the near future though.

[khanibal]

Thanks for the reply chris :]


I make it habbit to freshly reformat once every month or two, so it sounds like I'm good to go!

[timbob2469]

I just swapped in an Asus Nforce1 (A7N266) up from a crappy Biostar M7VIG-Pro (Via chipset) that failed after 2 weeks. Running winxp-pro. I re-installed windows on top of itself and surprisingly all of the data and settings remained intact. It did leave behind some stuff that was native to the board like sound and video drivers and Hardware monitor. I would recommend that you do an F3 search and delete the remnants of the old board before installing your new drivers. And any software that you have on CD like printer, scanner,etc.. use add/remove and re-install it. I also used regclean to get all scraps of the old board software out of the system. To do it the right way though you should put the hard drive as a slave into another system and pull all your irreplaceable data and do a clean install. I may have just gotten lucky this time and wanted to see if it would work. So far so good (3 days), it'll probably crash big time tonight.
bob

[SiGmA_X]

You have to 'repair' the OS. Boot off of the WinXP CD, and then it will say you have a existing WinXP install, and ask if you want to repair. Say NO. Then say you want to install XP, and select the HDD, and it will ask about wiping existing C:/Windows files, and say yes. Do NOT reformat your hdd unless you wan to.. It should work!

[khanibal]

Well I would remove all traces of the old board and whatnot if I could get to the HD. I dont have a spare computer anywhere, and im using a laptop now. I have to just try and boot from my last config with the old board. I'll try out the repair option if it doesn't work. I hoping I can still have my documents folder, since all my files are within there. we'll see what happens I guess.


thanks for the replies.

[SteveI]

I would advise against trying to boot without repairing. There are tons of differences. The single biggest concern to me would be the southbridge IDE drivers. It will undoubtably fail to boot into windows. However, if you are unlucky, it will get just far enough to load some drivers and totaly fubar your os. I suggest going right into the XP CD instead.

[khanibal]

yea that would suck :[


is it possible to slave my hd (never done this before) in my sisters old celeron comp? I can try and get it if I really need to. Just load it all there and burn it onto a cd or something.

Anyone have a guide for this? First time for everything eh!? :]

[khanibal]

ah nevermind. became impatient and took out my HD to take a look at it. switched the pins around to make it a slave and just popped it in. transfering my files as we speak.


thanks everyone who posted, I think i'll make out a-okay :]