• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Changing motherboard do I need to format?

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

Batman@

Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2002
Location
Ontario, Canada
The topic says it all. I am using the same cpu, same vid card, same everything except motherboard and ram. Can i just put it in without formatting? Or do i need to format it?
 
You do not need to format. I've got a bunch of friends that changes hdd's all the time. It's a cheap way of transferring a huge amount of data.

And; at school we have a 100kb internet connection, and the max you can get home is 16. So by bringing the hdd to the school, you can downlaod a whole piece of **** for free :D

It is best for performance although :(

elysium

edit ----> Why is **** a taboo word???

Because it is accepted by the majority of people as being a taboo word. In fact, it's one of the most taboo words. One of the few that aren't allowed on television.

Don't EVER surpass our language filter like that again. We have it there for a reason, and if we wanted you to be able to say that stuff here, we wouldn't have it.

Thelemac
 
Last edited by a moderator:
since the hard drive already has windows installed and the drivers for the old motherboard it would be better to format/reinstall windows.

If you are using winXP it should have all of the drivers for the new board so it should be a minimal pain to get windows to work with the new board.

If you have another version of windows (like ME/98) then when the first few times you turn on the comp it will keep saying new hardware found blah blah, insert the driver CD, insert the win 98 CD... unable to locate the drivers... do you want to browse for the drivers yourself...

It can be a pain but it can be done. there is also the possablility of driver conflicts between your old m/b drivers and the new ones. for best results I would say format/reinstall but you can usually get away with keeping your old windows setup if you can find all of the drivers.

I think elysium didnt realize your windows setup is on that drive, if you used your drive in another windows machine as a slave drive then it would be perfectly fine but if you use it as a master (boot) then windows will need the drivers for your new board.
 
elysium said:
You do not need to format. I've got a bunch of friends that changes hdd's all the time. It's a cheap way of transferring a huge amount of data.

And; at school we have a 100kb internet connection, and the max you can get home is 16. So by bringing the hdd to the school, you can downlaod a whole piece of **** for free :D

It is best for performance although :(

elysium

edit ----> Why is **** a taboo word???


Because it's a curse word. :rolleyes:


yes, you should format. He's not changing hard drives, he's changing motherboards. I've used several boards based on the SIS645 chipset. i have had to reinstall on every one of them. You'd think Win2000 would plug and play the few oddball components....but not at all.

I would DEFINITELY reformat and reinstall.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
But when you change hdd between computers, all equipment are changed from the old to the new for the hdd. It's the same as what he asked.

And the computers at school uses w2k, and my friend uses w2k, so it's been no problem for him.

But it is correct as DaddyB said, I did not consider it was his master hdd, I was assuming it was his slace. If there is any thing you want to keep on the old hdd, try to borrow a old one and install windows on that, make it master and the old one slave. If not, I would strongly recommend that you format. It's no harm, it will just improve the speed of you computer.

I don't consider **** to be a curse word in the moderns society, but I assume american "laws" are more in favor of the conservative than the norweigan. It really is no bother, I'll stop using it. It just surprised me :cool:

elysium
 
Last edited by a moderator:
cw823 said:
Because it's a curse word. :rolleyes:

*buzzer* (technically) wrong!

A "curse" word refers to a slanderous saying toward the Church or God or Christ. I.E. Removing God's name from the House of God.

The word s*it, and it's taboo-ness actually comes from Brittan (I believe) where the word s*it was used by the lower-class people. It was improper and rude for the higher-classes to use such words, so it got labeled as a bad word.

This nitpicking has been brought to you by my thirst for knowledge of stuff that nobody really needs to know! :D
 
backup and format the sucker... u will love seeing how fast it is for the first month ;)
 
Oni said:


*buzzer* (technically) wrong!

A "curse" word refers to a slanderous saying toward the Church or God or Christ. I.E. Removing God's name from the House of God.

The word s*it, and it's taboo-ness actually comes from Brittan (I believe) where the word s*it was used by the lower-class people. It was improper and rude for the higher-classes to use such words, so it got labeled as a bad word.

This nitpicking has been brought to you by my thirst for knowledge of stuff that nobody really needs to know! :D

Well, I'm not in the upper class, so I guess it's ok for me to use it??? :D

A lot of thos word have a fun story behind them. So also for the most used word in rap, I'll just write the explenation, and you'll probobly understand it. This is something that might been a court paper in the 1800 usa:

"Anonymes nobody judged For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge", that he had sex before marrige, which was a crime before, and some places still are. In good old american style, it was made into one word :D Still, this is only one of the storys, but it kinda makes sense.

elysium

Edit: I'm not christian either, so then I can use it??? Ohh, see the warning hanging in the air above my head :D :D :D
 
i changed my mobo from a kt133a chipset to a kt266a chipset equipped motherboard. when i switched mobos, and rebooted (without reinstallation) i got some strange errors and autoreboots. after reinstallation everything went smoothly.

so i think a reinstall of windows (and drivers) would be a very good idea.
 
Oni said:


*buzzer* (technically) wrong!

A "curse" word refers to a slanderous saying toward the Church or God or Christ. I.E. Removing God's name from the House of God.

The word s*it, and it's taboo-ness actually comes from Brittan (I believe) where the word s*it was used by the lower-class people. It was improper and rude for the higher-classes to use such words, so it got labeled as a bad word.

This nitpicking has been brought to you by my thirst for knowledge of stuff that nobody really needs to know! :D

It is too a curse word, didn't you see that episode of South Park? Anywho, back to the question at hand, you may actually be successful at swapping boards without a reinstall, but if you are it'd be (in my opinion) luck that'd make it work. Don't expect it to happen.
 
Back on topic, lol...

I used my HD from my old computer, and Windows XP kept giving me this weird screen before I could login (on the new PC). I changed just about everything: CPU, motherboard, and got rid my network card, etc. I went into the setup process (put in CD, and boot from CD), and chose to repair my current Windows. It recopied all the files, and now I can run Windows XP with no reformat or loss of data. I have to give kudos the M$ for that. :)
 
go ahead and try it...

and you'll find out that you have no choice but to format and reinstall.

you'll be really lucky if you can even get it booted to windows safe mode.. i doudt it tho

yes... swapping secondary h/d's is no problem, but not the same case for primary...

good luck.
 
Supposedly it worked almost a year ago for someone else who's a member here. I didn't see the actual swappage but from what I can remember of the thread it seemed sincere. It could happen....



....but I wouldn't put any money on it.
 
i went from a jet way board to an epox to a abit bh6 with windows xp pro and didnt reformat.when i would boot the first time it just said found new harware and it installed and ran fine.one time i got 1 error so i just put in the disc and repaired that version of windows and im using it right now.doesnt it just update the drivers like when you install a new video card or anything else.
 
Yeah, it kinda does that. However, allow me to liken it to something for possibly a bit of clarification.

Let's say you're standing on a platform. It's a very nice platform..keeps you a good twenty feet off the ground. However, you decide that you would like a new one cause yours just isn't pretty enough. The new one requires assembly.

You now have two choices. You can get off of your current platform, build your new one and then climb on that. Simple, easy (well, relatively, anyway :D), and effective. You just have to start your standing all over.

You could also replace your old platform piece by piece with the new one while you're standing on it. Good luck. :D

That's basically what you're doing when you swap your motherboard. Sure...you could just let Windows install new drivers...but you'll more than likely be unstable, cause it's trying to install drivers for things that it is currently using. Generally not a great idea.

An idea that doesn't involve formatting would be to delete win.com and then install Windows when you have the swap complete. That makes it look like a new install to Windows, though it keeps non-system files for you (settings and the like). I *think* that would work just as well..but I haven't tried for myself (yet) so I'm not really positive that it will.
 
Back