Lose info by switching mobo?

[Burnt Offering]

Question: If I have an A-Bit KT7 SDR motherboard, and I want to switch to a Epox 8KHA+ DDR, Will I have to wipe, reformat, reinstall windows, or will I be able to save my info on my hardrive? Will the existing OS on the hardrive load the new drivers for the new motherboard? Any info on this will help a great deal!! :confused:

[sptw]

Hi Burnt Offering.

I would go for a clean install.It's better to do that.Anyway you can try to remove your hd and install it on your new mobo.Before you do that, remove all the drivers related with your KT7 mobo and try, but i advise you, the chances that the things goes for the wrong way really exist.

[Burnt Offering]

Thank you sptw. The situation actually involves a friend of mine. I'm not sure what happened, but it looks like somone tried to plug a joystick or somthing into the digital out port of his raedeon graphics card. Anyway, it took out pretty much everything. His old mobo wont boot up so he cant save the info on his hard drive. What we might do is try to get the new mobo to boot up the hardrive, save the info he wants, then do a clean install. Does this sound feasible? :xworship:

[Player0]

Yes definately. The hard drive should boot just fine if it hasnt been damaged either. Windows will be confused at first, and will make you reinstall a bunch of drivers. But it should boot up in a somewhat stable manner.

I have an old test hard drive, which has WindowsME on it. I have installed it on several different motherboards, and it refinds everything, and all my utilities and stuff work on the drive. Im sure there is enough ghosts in the registry to fill the grand canyon at this point, but...Windows does make it work.

But I agree, a fresh install is a great idea when you change motherboards. Get it working, back things up, and do a clean install...that's what i would do.

[mackerel]

Doing a hard disk move seems to work ok with Windows95/98/Me, have done it many times.

But Win2k/XP gets really upset as I just found out earlier today when I wanted to add an NTFS partitioned disk into a WinME machine. I forgot I used NTFS so I couldn't see the disk in ME. No prob, I thought, I'll just boot of that instead. But it never completes boot, not even to safe mode. Ah well... time for a re-install anyway.