Help, this is horrible

[thehandler]

Just talked my wife into buying a new mobo and upgrading to XP pro. So just installed a new Asus with KT-600 chipset and tried to upgrade the Win 98se to XP.
All kinds of trouble and wont install. Keep getting all kinds of errors one after the other, cant load this cant load the installer for that. Keyboard, Drives, all kinds of issues. She just cant get XP to fully install. It gets almost completly done and then gives her that nasty blue screen error message.
Memory dump bla bla bla.
Wont boot no matter what you do as the fat 32 is problably long gone. She is terrified she has lost like years of data.
I feel like a bum as I talked her into this.
I thought converting to XP was supposed to be easy?
I never hear of anyone heaving an issue with this.
Anyone have any ideas?? Mike

[Daniel ~]

My guess is that your problem lies with your new motherboard. It's pretty much standard procedure to do a new clean install of the OS when upgrading to a new motherboard.

There are ways around this that work with differening degrees of success.

But As I prefer a clean install I haven't myself taken the time to write them down. If you have files of real importance to you on your wifes hard drive, then wait a bit, I'm sure someone will come around with detailed instructions for doing this.

[SteveI]

To try to recover data, try taking the drive out, and installing it into a good working system. Try to access the drive from there, and see if you can copy all the data over. Once completed, definitely, reformat, and start over with the OS install.

I've never tried to upgrade 98 to XP.... With a motherboard swap to boot, I can assure you the os is fubar, but not necessarily all the data. Good luck.

[thehandler]

Originally Posted by SteveI

To try to recover data, try taking the drive out, and installing it into a good working system. Try to access the drive from there, and see if you can copy all the data over. Once completed, definitely, reformat, and start over with the OS install.

I've never tried to upgrade 98 to XP.... With a motherboard swap to boot, I can assure you the os is fubar, but not necessarily all the data. Good luck.

Well I'm an idiot and I let her do this. I just had this same issue myself when I switched over my VIA board to a new ABit NF2 board. I already had XP on the drive but too much of a harware change for it and I was unable to boot back into the drive. Was also not able to repair the drive.
Part of the problem was that I was not smart enough to delete all the VIA drivers prior to shut down of the old board. So yes I had to install XP fresh to a new RAID set up and then pull my important data off of the original drive just as you indicated.
With my wifes drive, I assume she would be ok because it was a VIA to VIA swap on the mobo. However, I was too stupid to tell her to delete the old and install the new drivers for the new board PRIOR to trying to upgrade to XP. So XP is trying to install and the new mobo drivers are not even installed yet either. I assumed this would be as good as a fresh install of XP since it was upgrading from 98. Now I realize a fresh install is required with a mobo switch upgrade or not.
I appreciate very much your help Daniel and SteveI. Mike

[Daniel ~]

Don't be to hard on yourself, we all face a learning curve, often a very sharp and nasty one!

[thehandler]

as suggested, I installed the hd to my system and read the data from it from my xp drive. All is intact. Very comforting. thanks guys, Mike

[Daniel ~]

Great news! Glad your wife is speaking to you again! ":O}

[Uncle Bob]

Originally Posted by Daniel ~

Great news! Glad your wife is speaking to you again! ":O}

There's alot to be said for that!

[Daniel ~]

And I'm sure she will say it! LOL