Computer mainboard upgrade and transfer of old hard drives

[dupont]

I am in the process of upgrading my PC. XP Pro installed.

I have a good working system currently in use where everything works OK and want to transfer the hard drives ( there are two physical hard drives ) to a new motherboard that uses a faster Intel ( as opposed to the current AMD ) processor.

I have done the preliminaries on the old system, including cloning the two hard drives to two hard drives that have more capacity and all works OK.

Just in case of a catastrophe I have the original C drive on the smaller hard drive currently off line and disconnected - but it works OK.

I have copied the content of the XP Pro installation disk to a folder on the new ( C: ) hard drive that will be in use on the new mother board as I realize all the drivers will need to be loaded for the new motherboard. There is loads of space spare now on the hard drives I intend to use on the new mother board setup.

I have done this before, years ago, and I seem to remember that the best strategy to use when installing the drives on the new mother board is to initially boot into safe mode and then let the system discover the new hardware. The system then worked OK.

I have also done it before and had a failure.

What is the best sequence of events to follow to ensure a functioning system on the new motherboard installation with the old hard drives.

I have so much installed on the working system and so many saved passwords etc that I really do not want to re-install the whole system on the new motherboard setup.

Any suggestions welcome.

[Michael Chare]

Try uk.comp.homebuilt

[Scott M]

You've got backup/spare drives galore(!) so just power up the new board on the bench with one of them and see what happens. At worse you'll have to recreate it.

If this works and you keep your XP in a tidy state (ie there hasn't been too much crap installed over the years) then it's preferable to a re-install as it always takes weeks to get everything back as one likes it. And there's always some setting or tweak that gets lost in the move.

Scott

[Andy Burns]

It's a while since I looked into it, but swapping an AMD and Intel CPU used to be too much for the HAL to bear, resulting in a blue screen, if you search you might find underhand methods of swapping to a different HAL, but you're quite likely to break it doing that too.

[NT]

The joys of windows. Can you just reinstall it, whereupon it will reuse the existing use settings?

NT

[Brian Gaff]

Well, I've never been able to make it work if the processor family or manufacturer has been altered. I suspect this might be due to some low level driver needed to boot windows initially, ie the capability to use a detection system to do this might only have existed at install time. Its possible of course that someone has worked out how this works and hacked it by now!

Brian

[Mark]

I always install from proper installation media onto a new drive. The old drive(s) are connected so you can get all your data.

[Scott M]

Tha' one.

[dupont]

I remember on the previous failed upgrade it was a AMD > Intel change that is why I specifically mentioned it.

Yes Scott, it's all those little tweaks and things set to my preference that can take ages to remember if you ever do remember them all.

One thing in my favour is that after trying it, and if it fails, I can always recreate a clone of the original disk again.

I'll do some more searching first so any further ideas welcome.

[Caecilius]

When I last did this, I found XP didn't work with SATA drives in AHCI mode (it just blue-screened during boot), and I needed to change the BIOS to use IDE legacy mode. Most modern motherboards will have the SATA drives set to AHCI in the BIOS by default, so watch for that.

If you have problems with new hardware that's used too early in the boot for hardware detection to kick in, you can sometimes get around this by installing the driver for the new hardware on the old system. I've done this when moving a system from an IDE to a SCSI boot disk - install the SCSI driver on the IDE system to avoid an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE blue screen when booting the new system.

[Andy Burns]

It will ... but you have to be careful, if the drives are in AHCI mode at time of installation, and you have the proper drivers, it works fine, there's probably a minimum service pack too.

What XP hates is discovering the drives are in the "opposite" mode at runtime compared to install time.