What's the best way to Swap Mobo's

[Blaylock]

So I'll be swappin out my old MSI 890FXA (see sig) for my new ASRock 990FX Extreme9 (which should be arriving soon).

What is the 'cleanest' way to swap these components without loosing Windows and such. Been quite a while since I've swapped just a mobo and if I remember correctly it was a pain in the arse.

 

[EarthDog]

You can uninstall chipset drivers, lan drivers, audio drivers, etc. and then just drop the new board in. That said, on the intel side, I don't even bother doing that half the time. It will go in, figure itself out for a couple minutes, I reboot, install proper drivers and go.

 

[Robert17]

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Definitely this

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[trents]

If the motherboards in question were old enough and you OS was new enough (say, Windows 8) such that the OS had native drivers for the new motherboard chip set then you could seamlessly swap in the new board. Doesn't sound like that set of conditions applies in this case.

 

[Blaylock]

Trents. I'm running Windows 7 on my MSI 890FXA-GD65 and will be swappin it with an ASRock 990FX Extreme9. I would assume Win 7 would have native drivers for both of these as they are both withing 2-3 years old.

 

[RGone]

1. Were hard drives running AHCI mode on the older board? If they were make sure bios on new board is set to AHCI mode.

2. If you do as EarthDog said in above post you should be okay to swap boards and windows will install native drivers from its repository.

3. I have made it a practice over the last 15 years or so to install windows new when I intend to use a certan system for an extended period of time. If I was just testing boards then I often swapped without installing new O/S but for the long run, I install new O/S.
RGone...

 

[Blaylock]

I left the drive in it's default mode. It is a SATA drive. Is there a way to find out if AHCI is enabled by default?

Hmmm, I'm going to go with E_D's suggestion as I'll be ordering an SSD within a year anyhow and will do a fresh install then. Thanks for the advise.

 

[trents]

If you left the drive option on default in bios you may be running them in IDE mode. Go into bios and look in tabs that may have labels like "Advanced" or "Onboard Peripherals" or similar. The SATA options will be AHCI, IDE and RAID. You want AHCI. But if it's not already set to AHCI then you just can't change it to that in bios without first editing the Windows Registry to recognize the change. It's a simple edit. I've done it many times in these situations. If you change it in bios without first editing the registry then you won't be able to boot into Windows.

 

[Blaylock]

Just an update. The drive was set to IDE. When I booted up the first time with the new board The Bios was set to AHCI so Windows when into self repair mode. I let it run for about 10 mins before I reset. Entered Bios switched it to IDE mode and Viola. Up and running. I got sick of the plain Black case so I figured while my system was torn down I'd give a little FLAVA to my case. Just waiting for the clear coat to dry now.

 

[trents]

IDE mode sacrifices a little disc performance.