changing motherboard

[the spaniard]

hi can someone offer some advice on this please am gonna change my mother board shortly to a better model but from the same manufacturer (asus) thing is do i have to reinstall (and reactivate) xp home or is there a chance it will boot and i can just chnage the drivers ect ,no other mods are schedualed at the same time,thanks

[lanman31337]

Windows XP is finicky, you'll probably have to reactivate windows, the chipsets are probably going to be different, etc. It shouldn't be a big deal if you have to reactivate since you own XP right?

[Ravsitar]

If I was going through the effort of chaning out the motherboard i'd just reinstall xp. You'll get more stability and a cleaner setup. Besides you'll HAVE to re-activate xp after you swap motherbaords.

[the spaniard]

thanks for the replys ,yes it is my copy of xp ,i just wondered with it being to same manufacturer thats all,but hey no probs a reinstall it is ,cheers for the help:)

[Leaff]

You dont need to do a complete reinstall when changing boards. All you need to do is go in to device manager and change your ide driver to standard IDE from whatever it is now. Reboot to make sure it stays in. After that you should be able to swap out the boards and redetect all the new components. Most likely you will need to reactivate XP but you won't require a complete reinstall.

leaff

[the spaniard]

ok i changed the boards over had a quick look round the new bios and then chanegd boot order to cdrom yeah? expecting xp to boot from cd but it wont the cdrom starts but the window where you can choose weather to start in safe mode or not comes up...? saying windows was not shut down properly...how come i cant boot from the xp cd(to do a full clean install) or am i doing something wrong..any help apreciated ...btw went for a abit is7 in the end if that helps.cheers

[lanman31337]

boot order in which i do just about everything..

1. CDROM
2. Floppy
3. IDE0

FYI, you probably have to press a key when it starts to load the xp cd, it'll say at the bottom right after POST to press any key to load from CD-ROM.

[the spaniard]

yeah it says that "press any key to boot from cd rom " but when yer do it goes back to the "safe mode" options screen and then after 30 second or so it trys to load windows from the old drive?!? do i need to fdisk this drive(it has an original installation of xp home on it) to be able to boot from xp cd rom?

[lanman31337]

no you shouldn't have to fdisk, the xp cd will take care of it if you need to. Sounds like it's totally bypassing it, you have to be quick with that key or else it won't work. Make sure that second IDE channel is working.

[the spaniard]

ok sorted now all reinstalled and activated ok .... many thanks for help......only one prblemm now i had a 120 gig seagate used for back up of all my stuff yeah? well the bios regonises it but when i try to explore it it says this disk is not formatted do you want to format it now ...whats happened there? i had over 80 gig of stuff that i cant loose on there ....please help!

[the spaniard]

all sorted now fyi ,looks like currupt directorys were the cuase,dunno how that happened but whisky was invloved :D
anyway ontrack raw recovery is fechin me files back as we speak cheers for all the help though