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New Motherboard & CPU

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I would like to upgrade to a new motherboard and CPU. Should I do a clean install or is there a proper way to use my current hard drive and OS? (Windows ME)

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New Motherboard & CPU

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There are two schools of thought on this issue. It is my belief that both are equally valid. One is to go ahead and boot into safe mode and going into device manager to remove all devices other than the basics ie. floppy hard drive. You basically leave all the common components. shut down the system. Make the hardware switch,putting your expansion cards in as close a proximity slotwise as they were in the old motherboard, then have your drivers for all your hardware handy and power up in normalmode and let the Operating system recognize your hardware. Thats One. The other thought by many is that anytime a motherboard is replaced you need to do a complete fresh install of the operating system and hardware drivers. I have seen the firstwork with some systems and not work on some others So I guess you could say to be on the safe side do a fresh install. Its up to you basically you should just make sure you dont damage components in the process. Remember Software can be fixed hardware must usually be replaced.

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I would agree with caller 1 in theory, yet I take a slightly different approach, and have done several hundred upgrades of this type without having to re-install the operating software.

First – copy down all your important settings, ie ISP numbers, and backup any data you couldn’t live without.

2nd – Setup the new motherboard, with video card only ( in near to original slot )( This helps in resolving PCI conflicts ), and the floppy drive. Boot the machine into BIOS, usually by hitting the DEL key at startup.

Ensure the bios is set to recognize PnP OS, primary video is set to AGP or PCI, depending on your card, and that PCI detection is set to automatic.

Install the rest of your peripherals, the hard drive, and boot up. 99 times out of 100, you will be ok, but have all your device drivers handy, in case you need to load them.

Check the system settings in Control panel, and make sure all devices are recognized with no errors.

Then, as a last resort, you could do a clean install.

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I have done this with no backup at all i just shut down the computer changed the motherboard and memory and cpu and restarted the computer and woops after installing all the drivers (whcih I made sure I have before I upgraded) the computer was back to normal, in other words you dont have to do anything before you upgrade as long as the harddrive stays the same, since windows does not load any device drviers for devices it does not detect you dont even have to remove the old devices, thats how Idid it more then once and it worked just fine.
In fact you can even do that without upgrading and still not loosing any data by deleting the enum tree of the registry (I do that when there are conflicts between devices and I want to reinstall all of them).
In other words dont bother with anything just shutdown windows unscrew the box pop in your new hardware and restart windows every thing will just be fine after you install the drives, You dont need any backups or device removels before youupgrade.

New Motherboard & CPU

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if you want you can try it out, take the hard drive to a different computer and boot into the harddrive and you will see that windows adjusts itself rightaway to the new hardware.

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one thing I recomend in addition to the other suggestions is to create a copy of the m/b’s driver disk onto your hard drive. Occasioally you may have difficulties installing the drivers for the ide controllers in windows. Hard drives may work, cdsmay not. If the drivers are all on cd and you cant access your cd in windows, you can’t install the drivers.

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