Swapping Motherboards

I currently have an Abit BD7 motherboard, which is quite possibly the most useless board ever? Anyway, I now have an Asus P4S533-E, which I hope is far more reliable.

I was hoping to swap the boards over, and carry on working with XP as normal, but no such luck... Any ideas on how to get the board to work/recognise the hard drives, without reformatting and installing afresh? Thanks.

I think you will be wasting time trying to do a direct swap of the mobo. I have read threads where someone outlined a procedure that works...sort of! However, they finished up with the admonition that you would be better off reformating and starting from scratch.

XP is evil when it comes to that.. I had to reformatt to use my new P4PE Thats one thing I liked about Win98 se :0)

Just a little tip I learned, before you move your XP system disk to a new mb, go to device manager and change your HD controller from whatever it is (Intel 80xxx ultra ata hd controller, for example, or something like that) to "Standard Dual Channel IDE Controller". You can do this in XP by selecting "update driver", then "install from a list", then "I will choose". Standard IDE Controller should be one of the options. Then go ahead and move it to a new mb. I've done this a number of times and so far have not had any problem booting a HD with XP on a new mb. This does not mean that you won't have to reactivate XP, in fact, because of your hardware changes, you most likely will have to reactivate XP, but at least it saves you the hassle of re-loading programs, files, and settings.

I wish I knew this before I lost 60GB of stuff lol