Replacing hardware with Windows XP

Hi all,

I intend to replace my motherboard and CPU upgrading my PC. I know that Windows NT 4.0 and 2000 used to be fussy when replacing these components and sometimes would refuse to work at all. A couple of times I had to reinstall the whole thing.

With Windows XP, I believe we have the same problem. Any of you know a way to just install the original hard disk with XP in the new motherboard and go through the process without much pain?

I have no problems with license activation, it is just a hardware upgrade. I'd appreciatte a feddback on this.

Thanks,

 

Just pop in your CD and do a repair installation so the hardware can be detected. That should be all you need to do (aside from reactivating, of course).

 

Hey Abraxas,

Thanks for the prompt reply...

What if I boot the system and than have a BDS? Can I run the setup/repair outside the Windows environment? My experiences with NT 4 were not very promising doing that and a couple of times I ended up with a system totally dead: it would replace the system files and would not boot anymore...

Cheers,

 

Just an update on the above... I visited Microsoft and found the link below. It looks like a hell of a job to do the migration... Have a look at:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q314070

Cheers,

 

That is a scary article. But I think is refers primarily to moving one hard drive's contents to another hard drive on a different system. If you have only one HD on both computers, and you are not migrating from one drive to another, I still think it is a managable situation. You are moving to another system, but not to another hard drive.
In your case, the drive letters will be the same, which is one great advantage.

This section stood out for me:

"The Windows\Repair folder that contains your source computer hardware and software configuration files and the Setup.log file may not be valid for the new hardware on the destination computer to which you restored them. You should perform an in-place upgrade on the destination computer to update these files so that you can make the appropriate repairs in the future if necessary. "

This appears to say what I had said, that an "upgrade ", by which I think they mean the same as I meant by a "repair installation ", may be all that is necessary.

The only place I see problems is if your old computer is not ACPI-compliant but the new one is. Perhaps someone more knowledgable about that situation will advise us.

I'm suggesting that you not even attempt to boot the new system from the HD, but boot from the XP CD and do a repair installation before you boot into Windows proper.

 

Thanks Abraxas,

Yeah, as you said, it looks pretty scary... Next week I will replace the MB and CPU and follow your suggestions. I will let you know how things went...

Cheers,

 

Hey guys,

Just an update on the above subject. I have kept my old motherboard (DFO AK-75c) and done all the recent updates to it including the latest BIOS. Then I replaced the CPU with a AMD Athlon XP 2100 (1.7 Ghz) after creating an image, just in case.

Well, XP did not like it at all the first time and died on me. Tried a repair, did not work. Then I restored the image, replaced the old CPU, checked, OK. Put the new CPU back, set the proper jumper on the MB and then, following Abraxas suggestion, tried a repair without booting to XP first, from the CD.

As I suspected, the "repair" only stuffed up even more the system, giving me blue and black screens. I had this problem before with NT 4 and W 2000. Sometimes works fine, sometimes it replaces the files with the originals and in the end the hell breaks loose.

Restored the image again and, still with the new CPU, rebooted directly to XP. Believe it or not, it worked well. XP did not complain and still is working happily after several reboots. But because nothing is perfect, it rebooted by itself twice. My settings allow this and now I have to find out what caused it. Unbelievable!!!

Long live Microsoft!

Thanks for the suggestions...

 

Sounds like it was pretty messy! Glad you made it through.

 

My opinion with a little BAD experience thrown in.

Regardless of what can or can not be done;

The safest and MOST RELIABLE way for now and the future, is to go right to square one and start over.

Or, next best and hope for the best;

Put the HD in the new machine and do not let it even THINK about booting to the HD. And just re-install the OS.

This will make it look pretty much like a new install but at the same time preserve most existing setups.

And stands a much better chance of readjusting things properly. In use items may not be readjusted properly

Mix-N-Matching the old and new creates BIG Problems. Been there done that with disasterous results.

But steps that should be taken before moving the HD.

Make sure that everything that is not needed by the OS ( AV etc. ) is shut down so that it does not load startup BEFORE removing from the old.

And also changing the Video back to the Standard VGA setup before moving helps to smooth things out a little.

I say this because sometimes ( quite often ) things loading at startup ( and the Video ) can, ( or sure may ) cause problems. And sometimes a re-install of software is required anyway in order for it to work properly in the new system.

I believe if you make that the first step you will be far better off.

BillyBob

 

Thanks Billy Bob,

I partly agree with you. My experience with Windows NT and 2000 show me you are right. Even the good old Windows 98 behaves the same way (supposedly to be inteligent, said Mr. Gates, ha, ha, ha...).

I found out that reinstalling from the scratch is sometimes better than wasting time fixing old/new problems. Windows, even XP, it seems, does not cope with new situations yet. Maybe someday with a little bit of AI, who knows, things will be different.

But it is all fun (unless you are working on a production machine with the boss breathing on your neck).

Tomorrow I am going to play with a friend's PC, replacing the MB, video and CPU using the old hard disk with XP. Ain't I going to have a lot of fun?...

Cheers and thanks,

 

I see no surprises ahead for you. As you are aware that it can go either way.

If it works it can save time. GREAT

If it don't it is AW SHUCKS !!! and start over.

Ain't I going to have a lot of fun?...

Yessir. Lots of it.

Good Luck
BillyBob

 

I will keep you posted...

Cheers,

 

Hey guys,

An update on the above...

Yeah, I had lots of fun trying to replace motherboard, CPU, video adapter and network card and using the old hard disk installation. XP crashed all the way down to hell in every way it could from blue and black screens to rebooting by itself and applications crashing when it would reboot "successfuly ". Doung the "repair" only made things worse.

After 3 hours enjoying the sado-masoquism party, I reformatted the HD and started from the scratch and my user is a happy guy today with XP, SP1 and all the apps running happily. It seems to me that some users, if they decide to change their hardware, may face similar problems besides the re-activation with MS.

This particular machine has 3 OSs: XP, 2000 and Linux. After XP was born again, I booted into 2000 and surprise! 2000 "saw" all the hardware changes, installed most of the drivers and asked me to install the new ones and rebooted without a glitch, smiling all the way through. Linux 7.3 also detected all the changes, asked me to delete the old configuration files, created the new ones, continued to boot and is a happy guy as well...

Oh boy! It looks like we are going to have a Service Pack 3 to fix the 1 one of these days... God bless Microsoft!

Thanks to all for the chat...

 

did i get lucky or am i missing the point

Had a client who got hit by lightning and wipe out every device except the hd and video card.

Replaced system board, power supply, pci firewire card modem and sound card. When I booted after devices installed everything came up perfectly. Was I just lucky on this ???

Was a Dell 8200 and replaced with Dell parts.

 

Question for experienced hardware swappers:

I had an experience a while back after attempting to run a boot-time defragment operation with Executive Software Diskeeper 7.01, which was supposed to defragment the MFT, Master File Table. After it completed, it rebooted, then NTFS reported errors, and attempted to completely reverse all the operations that Diskeeper made. I say "attempted," because half the third-party applications folders in logical partition D disappeared, and WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) was disabled (all of the system information MSC consoles reported that they couldn't get any system information.) In other words, the Windows information and repair tools were broken. Otherwise, though, Windows and my remaining applications were still operating normally, including online operations.

I restored several earlier System Restore Points, but that didn't fix the broken WMI, probably because of missing files or folders, after the disk error repair.

Well, what do you do when your repair tools are broken? I ended up running a Repair operation from the Windows XP CD (this was before SP1.)

What then happened, was I was prompted for my OEM AGP driver CD during the hardware scan. I selected Skip, thinking that Windows would use the previously installed driver(s.) When Windows XP finally booted up, I found that AGP was disabled, and the RIVA TNT2 video card was detected as a PCI card, and my GUID was changed, and Windows now required re-activation. Re-configuring the video card as AGP had no effect on the new GUID.

The automated online re-activation failed, and instructed me to call a Microsoft representative. He gave me a new activation code when I described to him what happened, and said it was a common scenario.


MY QUESTION IS: If I had to run a Windows XP Setup Repair again and install the OEM AGP drivers when prompted, will this again change my GUID, and will it require yet another re-activation? (I'm nervous about that, because I heard you only get two re-activations.)

BTW, I now have a Slipstreamed Windows XP Pro *SP1* CD that I burned by adapting the Windows-Help.NET article on integrating SP1 into the installation CD.

Would appreciate any information from anyone familiar with the vagaries of the Setup Repair behavior.

 

Rirmai,

Oh man!... This is serious! Have you contacted Executive software and reported what happened?

I frequently use Diskeeper at work and home and ocasionally, when things get pretty bad, use the boot defragmentation. I am luck in I never had a similar problem. Yours may be one of those "if such and such conditions is present..." problem and they may have a suggestion...

Re the activation, all I can say is good luck with MS... Maybe if we all get together could take them to court again???...

Cheers,

 

apeferreira,

Thanks for your concern, but this happened maybe four, five months ago, long past. The manual reactivation by calling a Microsoft number was fairly quick.

I'm mostly worried about the restriction to two re-activations, and would like to avoid testing that limit, should I upgrade my mainboard and video card. Could be, I'm worrying about nothing. I haven't heard of anyone being refused a reactivation, after all.

As for Diskeeper, I wrote to Executive -- at least a couple of times, but got the equivalent of a blank stare. A REALLY BLANK stare. I really didn't think they'd have a clue, not without more details, which I couldn't provide.

I've uninstalled Diskeeper and returned to using Norton Speed Disk. It's much, much slower, but I think I see at least some performance improvement with its method of defragmentation. I didn't see any difference with Diskeeper optimization.

My symptoms could be because I have the darn 512-byte cluster size (that's 1/2-K) that you get when you run CONVERT.EXE, instead of faster the 4K clusters, when you Re-partition and Format /fs:NTFS /a:4096.

Theory is small clusters result in less slack (wasted) space. But they may not perform as well on slower machines -- I have a P3 933-MHz -- which is a reason I'm worried about XP re-activation limits -- I'm falling behind current CPU speeds.

Oh yeah, the lost third-party applications were the most recently-installed utilities, so there wasn't any problem with critical data loss. I lost Systemworks, but NAV and NPF were unaffected. I re-installed Systemworks, and it remembered my registration, no problem. I guess I lucked out.

Roger