New Chipset Motherboard Clean Install OS?

I love monkeying with my hardware, but I hate clean installing an OS and all my apps.

My current install of XP Pro Corporate has survived three motherboard upgrades without any problems. I think I owe this to the fact that XP is so "self-healing" and all three motherboards were VIA chipsets (KT266, KT333, KT400).

My NF7-S V2.0 will arrive this afternoon and as you might imagine, I'm itching to throw it in and play with it.

So, my question is:

Has anyone reading this successfully migrated from a VIA chipset to Nvidia chipset motherboard without doing a clean install of XP Pro Corporate? I do not intend to utilize the SATA feature. I already know that a clean install is the best way to go, so you don't need to tell me that.

Thanks

Hoot

From my epox kt333 to my 8rda+ i had to reinstall windows...

when i went from my 8K7A (AMD chipset) to my nforce it wouldnt boot at all, didnt even see the windows install. That is with win2k though, so its probablynot much help to you.

I have played around with moving drives from one system to another, including switching from AMD to Intel and used these operating systems Win98, WinNT 4.0, Win2K.

The only time it would NOT work was when I switched from a duallie to a single cpu

One thing that MAY help: revert ALL installed drivers to the most generic ones possible before switching mobos.

I do think that instability issues are more likely this way, but it does work.

Good luck.

Thanks to everyone who replied. I am at work today, but as soon as I can figure out how to get my water block standoffs mounted, I will install the board and see first-hand what happens.

Hoot

EDIT: Scrounged around at work and finally found some nylon shoulder washers that will fit the standoff holes, so I will defintiely have the board installed tonight.

Went from A7V333 to 8RDA+ with only a repair install (XP Pro Corp. w/SP1 intergrated), and it lasted about 1 1/2 months as well as a new bios chip. Then some type of corruption occured where XP would load to the black logo screen and then just keep restarting.

Probably somthing I did though (I was just getting used to my new board and overclocking and tweaking all sorts of things, until I found my sweet spot)......


nYmph

Well, the motherboard came, I installed it, routed all the cabling and tied it up nicely, installed all the water cooling blocks, rerouted and trimmed to length the tubing, bled the air out, etc.

Fired it up with the default settings and went into the bios. Disabled SATA and let 'er rip. I didn't get far. As soon as Win XP Pro/Corp started, a blue screen message flashed by in the wink of an eye and the system rebooted again. Repeated attempts to run resulted in the same. Tried catching that quick screen glimpse with a camera about 10 times, but it was too fast. Tried my hard drive in my wifes VIA based system and it worked fine. Grabbed an old HDD off the shelf that had Win98se and after detecting and loading all the necessary drivers, it ran fine. Grabbed an old hard drive with Win2k Pro and encountered a similar failure to WinXP, except it at least let me read the "STOP 0x0000007B INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE" message. I really don't want to do a clean install, but I do not know which XP file(s) to delete so that it redetects the hardware, especially the IDE ports upon boot.

Tried every conceivable setting in bios, but to no avail. The fact that Win98se loaded and ran fine pretty much exonerates the motherboard and bios settings anyway.

Before I bear the burden of a clean install, does anyone have any tried-and-true, simple process that can save me the effort?

Hoot

(KT266, KT333, KT400) are not really different chipsets unless you beleive VIA. They are basically tweaked KT266 meant to give new life to stale VIA product developement.

You will never survive upgrading from VIA KT400 to Nforce2.

So is it fairly safe to do this from a via 266 to a 400 ?

I know it is safe to do it from an 8k3a to a KX7-333 . It was cool the way xp just detected all the different hardware and loaded it up.

Hoot said:

Well, the motherboard came, I installed it, routed all the cabling and tied it up nicely, installed all the water cooling blocks, rerouted and trimmed to length the tubing, bled the air out, etc.

Fired it up with the default settings and went into the bios. Disabled SATA and let 'er rip. I didn't get far. As soon as Win XP Pro/Corp started, a blue screen message flashed by in the wink of an eye and the system rebooted again. Repeated attempts to run resulted in the same. Tried catching that quick screen glimpse with a camera about 10 times, but it was too fast. Tried my hard drive in my wifes VIA based system and it worked fine. Grabbed an old HDD off the shelf that had Win98se and after detecting and loading all the necessary drivers, it ran fine. Grabbed an old hard drive with Win2k Pro and encountered a similar failure to WinXP, except it at least let me read the "STOP 0x0000007B INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE" message. I really don't want to do a clean install, but I do not know which XP file(s) to delete so that it redetects the hardware, especially the IDE ports upon boot.

Tried every conceivable setting in bios, but to no avail. The fact that Win98se loaded and ran fine pretty much exonerates the motherboard and bios settings anyway.

Before I bear the burden of a clean install, does anyone have any tried-and-true, simple process that can save me the effort?

Hoot

Click to expand...

Sorry if this sounds stupid, but I didn't see anything about a repair install with XP. You tried that right? (This worked for me without doing a clean install).

nYmph

I got my copy of XP Pro Corp from our IS department since we have a license that also covers employees home PCs. As such, I could not do that.

It does not matter now, as I have done a clean install of Win2000 Pro w/SP3 until I can check out the install CD from the IS department here at work.

Everything is running fine with one exception. Whenever I try to install an Nvidia driver, regardless of version, for my GF4 TI4200, Upon reboot, Windows fails to start until I go back in under SAFE mode and remove the driver. I did not have this problem with any of the VIA based motherboards. I am running all the bios settings at their conservative default values still. Once I get this video driver resolved, I will try overclocking.

Hoot