Swapping Mobo's

[Brian99]

Hello RFD guru's,

I had a quick question about motherboards. I would like to know if I can simply swap same motherboards from a computer and have it up and running without having to do a reformat/reinstall. Is this do-able?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Cheers,

Brian.

[mr_raider]

Linux: yes

Windows XP: will bork most of the time

Vista: may bork half the time

Windows 7: who knows?

[terrybear]

if the cpu motherboard & motherboards chipset are the same as the original ones yes it shouldn't be a issue.

[jz1n]

The answer to your question is ... perhaps. You have to try and see.

No one can tell you what will happen exactly because it depends on the hardware configuration. I can tell you that I've changed mobos before while running under XP and I was able to simply reinstall drivers without formating. That's my personal experience, but I'm sure there are many others that can tell you otherwise.

[willy]

What are the old and new mobos ?

There's a recent thread on this very same topic ....

[night_day]

I just did this with my Win 7 install and everything worked fine. Win 7 found all the new drivers and I was good to go.

[Avatar]

I have done this on an XP and Vista not long ago and I still could just updated my drivers to get it to go. Same CPU and ram config though.

[PureReborn]

if its the same config for everything then sure it should work. Maybe you'll have to config the bios a bit but u shouldnt lose the data on you HDD.

[mr_raider]

I have done this on an XP and Vista not long ago and I still could just updated my drivers to get it to go. Same CPU and ram config though.

It depends. Win XP builds a hardware abstraction layer when the OS is installed. Major device changes will cause the OS to throw an error. The only time I succeeded in doing this was moving from a VIA k7 chipset to a VIA k8 chipset. When I tried to go VIA -> nvidia and then nvidia -> AMD, it booted to a blue screen. No safe mode either.

Perhaps Vista and WIn 7 have adjusted the way they load drivers, but XP used to handle massive IRQ changes very poorly.

[npinc]

XP is the easiest, Vista far more picky. On XP, I've switched between AMD and Intel computers, different boards, VIA to nVIDIA to Intel, etc. No probs. It just depends if you know what you're doing or not.

I haven't tried it on 7 yet, but fundamentally it's the same as Vista, so I would imagine same would apply.
Search Google for a tutorial. I'm pretty sure there's one out there somewhere.

Mr. Raider: It has nothing to do with the HAL. What throws it off is the drive controllers primarily. From SP3 there's also an Intel CPU driver that likes causing issues if you switch to an AMD based system on the same install. Both can be easily dealt with.

[komal]

Yes, you can. I've migrated my XP install twice.

[Brian99]

You guys are awesome! Very much appreciated.


Linux: yes

Windows XP: will bork most of the time

Vista: may bork half the time

Windows 7: who knows?

Will test this out once I receive board.


if the cpu motherboard & motherboards chipset are the same as the original ones yes it shouldn't be a issue.

Everything is exactly the same.


What are the old and new mobos ?

There's a recent thread on this very same topic ....

Hey willy, sorry I didn't notice the other thread, and the search function wasn't working when I started this thread.

They are the same motherboards (Asus M3A78-EM), it will be an RMA replacement.


I have done this on an XP and Vista not long ago and I still could just updated my drivers to get it to go. Same CPU and ram config though.

Hopefully this will work out again, PITA to install everything again.


if its the same config for everything then sure it should work. Maybe you'll have to config the bios a bit but u shouldnt lose the data on you HDD.

Exact same configuration. Bios was stock, so that shouldn't be a problem. Not worried about data loss as I've backed up everything. Just didn't want to reinstall and reconfigure everything. Didn't get a chance to image the drive before the mobo died.

[komal]

It depends. Win XP builds a hardware abstraction layer when the OS is installed. Major device changes will cause the OS to throw an error. The only time I succeeded in doing this was moving from a VIA k7 chipset to a VIA k8 chipset. When I tried to go VIA -> nvidia and then nvidia -> AMD, it booted to a blue screen. No safe mode either.

Perhaps Vista and WIn 7 have adjusted the way they load drivers, but XP used to handle massive IRQ changes very poorly.

You just literally swapped a motherboard and turned your computer on? Then you didn't know what you were doing, and it was your fault not that of XP.

[mr_raider]

You just literally swapped a motherboard and turned your computer on? Then you didn't know what you were doing, and it was your fault not that of XP.

Linux does it just fine. I beg to differ. It is XP's fault. If I have uninstall 15 drivers beforehand, might as well do a clean install.

[UndeadGhost]

just do a windows os repair from the installation cd. this will reinstall all the ahci drivers.

another way is to uninstall those drivers and select microsoft default before swapping (uninstall when you're still on old mobo then when you install new mobo it will automatically update the drivers)

[pitz]

Linux does it just fine.


If the kernel has been built up with enough drivers to run the hardware you're installing. Otherwise, lots of stuff won't work, it won't boot, or it will otherwise trap.



I beg to differ. It is XP's fault. If I have uninstall 15 drivers beforehand, might as well do a clean install.

In Linux, you have to reconfigure and rebuild the kernel. In XP, you have to do the uninstall thing. How is this fundamentally different?

[pitz]

Linux: yes


Linux: no (unless your kernel already supports the hardware that you're migrating to).

You might be confused with some distro that attempts to load, as modules, literally every driver possible under the sun (with lots of resultant failures). But even that can be problematic at times, and leads to a majorly bloated kernel.

I guess someone could do that with Windows as well -- blindly load a gazillion drivers for hardware that isn't installed, and then run around and boot the same config on a bunch of machines.

Personally, for XP, I just prefer the approach implied by VMware -- build an image that runs on a virtualization environment (ie: Xen, VMware, KVM), and just run that, instead of trying to mate the underlying hardware to the machine. XP is pretty ghetto now too :(.

[mr_raider]

Linux: no (unless your kernel already supports the hardware that you're migrating to).

You might be confused with some distro that attempts to load, as modules, literally every driver possible under the sun (with lots of resultant failures). But even that can be problematic at times, and leads to a majorly bloated kernel.

Very well. Replace Linux with Ubuntu. I swapped an nvidia 550 board to an AMD 770 with no issues. Then I enabled AHCI after the swap and still OK. The only time the distro borked is when I swapped from an ATI to an nvidia card. All I had to do was boot in recovery mode and re-initialize teh graphics drivers.

Virtually any Linux kernel will give you basic HDD, chipset and non accelerated graphics support allowing you to boot. Your wifi or webcam may not be supported, but the major components will.

I've tried to switch mobos under XP by uninstalling all the VIA hyperion drivers, ati catalyst, NIC and AGP BUS. Still no go. Even if it does work, there are countless reports of stuff not working, and eventually the response is the same wipe and re-install. We won't even talk about XP and mobo "software" RAID setups. I gave up that form of self flagellation years ago.

So far though I found windows 7 to be quite resilient. You can usually boot off the dvd to repair messed up boot sequences. I haven't done a major hardware swap yet.

[pitz]

Very well. Replace Linux with Ubuntu.

Okay...yeah Ubuntu is one of those distros that attempts to load everything under the sun (no pun intended). But its also dirt-slow booting up on my laptop because of this, compared with building my own kernel that only includes the hardware I actually have.

So its a tradeoff, but such behaviour shouldn't be generalized over the entire universe of "Linux".

Sometimes too, with those older Linux kernels, they will trap (ie: crash) on bootup if you're running on a newer CPU (where you don't hear of older Windows NT disks doing this on new machines). Just like I suspect that Windows95 or even Windows 98 would be impossible to run on a modern PC these days, even if you just used basic drivers -- timing issues and certain subtle differences in microcode essentially!