Question for motherboard upgraders using XP

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RWhite

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I'm working on a (non-music) project at my day job, preparing to roll out Windows XP to replace our Windows 98 workstations. I'll skip over all the fluff and get right to my question - has ANYONE here taken a system that had XP installed on it, replaced the motherboard, and then been able to use the system?

Everything I have been reading from Microsoft points to the hard drive controller being the key point in XP. If you do something to change the hard drive controller (or conversely do what I'm doing, which is try to move an XP "image" onto a different computer with different hard drive controller) then you are SOL, the system will never boot up with your current configuration.

If true this is a bummer, I'm the sort of guy who always has 4-5 PCs arround the house and I like to upgrade the motherboards periodically. It looks like with XP a motherboard upgrade means back up your data, wipe the hard drive, and then reinstall everything after swapping out the board.

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has successfully swapped a mobo without having to re-install.
 
I've not had to replace a MoBo on an existing XP machine (yet), But i can say that my reading about XP and these compatability issues points to BEWARE. I had to replace XP with Win2k on a machine that I backed up and wiped and when I boot I still get XP as an OS choice even though it doesn't exist. It hangs on tight. Seems like the long way might be the only way. Good Luck ;)
 
I think that would definitely be a problem. Even if it did boot it would be a mess. Just back up your data and do a clean install. Starting out with a fresh drive is a good thing after a while anyway. It sucks doing it but your computer will run better and it will be nice and clean and ready for you to fill the drive with all kinds of non essential crap that will slow it down all over again.
At least that's how it is with me...
 
swapping motnerboards

As the rest of you, I haven't yet done this with XP but you could try booting up into safe mode and removing everything under the ide controller and system devices from device manager..also if you are using an integrated sound/video/lan/modem then you will want to remove those from device manager as well..let windows boot back up and detect the new stuff..this works in 98se i know..but the BEST way to do it is to backup and start with a clean install on the new board...

also the guy who had the problem about xp still showing as an option..you may need to clean out the master boot record..i had a problem with the linux mandrake os select screen still coming up after removing the os... i believe the command from the prompt is format /mbr... you might want to double check before doing however..it's been a while.

dlv
 
I have done it. Several times in fact(its my job to try stupid stuff like this to see what sort of problems will arise).

It works, better than expected...it detected the new hardware right off the bat, instaled the drivers, and hit hit the ground running. BUT..

I would never ever do this on a production machine in a work enviroment.

On my one machine at home, Hell, I've done it twice now with no real problems. I upgraded from 98-me-xp and switched motherboards twice. The machine runs well, but I experiment a lot with differant software/hardware, so occasionally I get a mild problem. Nothing I cant handle, and a hell of a lot less trouble than re-installing it.

If it is for your home machine, and you are a reasonable technical person, go for it. Just be prepared to wipe it if it doesnt work...

If it is for someone else, dont even think about it. It might work fine, but I would never take that chance with someone elses data.
 
Re: swapping motnerboards

muskgrave said:
also the guy who had the problem about xp still showing as an option..you may need to clean out the master boot record..i had a problem with the linux mandrake os select screen still coming up after removing the os... i believe the command from the prompt is format /mbr... you might want to double check before doing however..it's been a while.

dlv
Click to expand...

Thanks muskgrave, I'll give that a try

Bdgr, it's good to know that someone has actually done this successfully. I'm sure I'll run into this somewhere down the line :)
 
Hey thanks for the replies. Perhaps now I'll fill in a little more detail about exactly what I'm trying to do...

At my day job working for a telecom company I work doing Helpdesk type stuff. My unofficial title is "PC God" a.k.a. "Workstation specialist", managing about 300 computers on hand. Over the past few years this has included keeping a library of PC software "images" on hand. To do this we use Symantec (Norton) Ghost, a wonderful program that will copy an image of a hard drive to a large file (or group of files). Sort of like zipping your hard drive.

In this library I keep complete images of several different types of computers (Pentium, P2, P3) with different motherboards (ASUS, Intel) and different software setups. Each of these images is a complete Windows 98 setup with MS Office and a whole slew of apps, network & hardware drivers setup, etc. etc. When some dumbass....er, I mean employee, accidentally erases his machine because he didn't read his email ("here's a virus for you") before opening it, all I have to do is boot the damaged system up from a floppy, connect to a Novell server, and copy down a new image. In 15 minutes tops the system is rebuilt and ready to go. On boot-up Windows 98 may find slight differences between the original machine and the destination, but it will nearly always load the right drivers on its own, or request them (I keep all useful drivers in a folder C:\DRIVERS - duh).

But XP is a whole new animal. I've had this type of issue before, with Windows NT4 - which is not a plug-n-play system and so has problems if the destination system is different than the source. But I would think XP should be able to figure this out. At home I tried swapping out an Athlon motherboard from an XP system and changing it with a P3, and the result was a horrible gak. Even if you would force the system into safe mode, it would still hang during bootup.

I thought I had found the answer to my problem in a Microsoft utility called Sysprep. Sysprep is not installed into XP by default, but it comes on the XP CD - I think it is in a directory called Deploy. Sysprep is a utility you run which tells the system to run a partial "setup" after the next reboot. You can also tell it to scramble the SID number - a randomly generated security code each NT, 2000, and XP machine has. You want to do this because if two computers with the same SID numbers are on a network together, it's a bad thing - kind of like "crossing the streams" in Ghostbusters! Sysprep is what all computer makers like Dell and Compaq use so that when you turn on your brand-new computer it finishes setup and lets you input your name & stuff.

Sysyprep should in theory let you run it, then make a Ghost image of a system, then copy that Ghost to a destination system. Then when you reboot the destination system, it should go out and detect hardware again, finish setup, and all would be well. But my actually testing with Sysprep has been pretty ugly, and unless the destination is an identical motherboard, the result is a BIG SORRY. So I did a bunch of reading into Sysprep and found where Microsoft says that the hard drive controller HAS to be the same, otherwise it will not work.

Which brings me back to my original point. If you are like me and want to install a newer, faster motherboard into your system on occasion, it seems like you are screwed. Unless your motherboard uses the same hard drive controller - and lets face it, if it does, you're not doing much of an upgrade - then you are SOL. Which is why I wanted to hear if anyone has managed to get around this little OS mess.

Bdgr - did you do your motherboard upgrades AFTER switching to XP, or before? And what type of motherboard did you switch from and to? I would be curious to know....

Anyway thanks for reading my post, and hopefully this info will be useful to some of you. - RW
 
RWhite said:

Bdgr - did you do your motherboard upgrades AFTER switching to XP, or before? And what type of motherboard did you switch from and to? I would be curious to know....
Click to expand...

After. One case, went from a Kayak XU HP machine to a IBM 300 PL Rambus. Totally differant machines and boards

at home, from an MSI to a TYAN to an IWILL, no problems whatsoever. however YMMV.

LIke I said, at home, give it a try, at work, dont. Create a seperate ghost for each motorboard, maybe evan each machine if they have radically differant hardware, and make yourself a boot cd or floppy with a menu, press one for asus, two for intel etc. Then have each menu item do a seperate net use comand to map to a differant share on the server containing the coresponding ghost. then run the ghost over the net.

Ghost is a wonderfull proggy, but be sure to run ghostwalker afterwards to change the sid on the box after ghosting, or you will have the same prob. The SID thing wont be much of a problem if your running a Novell net, but should you go to Active directory (as everyone will eventually...you will be assemalated), it will be a headache.

We are in the process of converting our lan from having dozens of resource domains to a single master domain under Active directory. we have about 15000 machines on the local lan, so its really getting messy.

Glad I have my isolated little lab that is somewhat sheltered from all this. We are a single power switch on a single router from being isolated from the rest of the wan, so at anytime we can unplugg and contiue to function while the rest of the wan goes down in flames.
.
 
also, you can boot off the XP CD and do a "repair intsall"...

I forget where exactly the option is, but at some point it gives you the choice of repairing your XP installation... changing any serious HD like the motherboard, this repair option is supposed to take care of any problems you might encounter without having to reformat.
 
Thanks, I forgot to mention that. THe repair should fix a hardrive prob. if it should arise.
 
I had to do this with a W2K box. I did what was mentioned earlier. Safe Mode > Remove all mobo related devices > Swap everything over to the new board > Run repair CD. When it booted, it detected all the new mobo's components... and voila. :p I had the same install as before, with a new mobo. This should be even easier (and yet harder, at the same time) with XP. Easier, because I've noticed that XP is "smarter" then W2K. I've never had such an easy time with installing hardware as I have since I switched to XP... but also harder, because.. well... for every single one of those installs, you're gonna have to "re-activate" XP. If you have a corporate version, (which I'm hoping you do) then you're lucky and this won't be a problem.. but if you don't.. then have fun waitin' on hold for the next year and a half.. :D

WATYF
 
My recent experience on this, the last 3 days, was not as smooth as the some of the above. I had one scsi driver which I could not disable and that stopped the ide boot drive even in safe mode in Win XP.

So, I ended up installing on top of the exisiting OS. Then I had to reinstall a bunch of software, including Sonar. Office XP was hosed without the old registry, had to re-install. Quite a mess finding all my old registration and serial numbers of software, plugins, etc.

The machine screams now but what a hassle. And, regarding activation, I was concerned that the MS database was going to give me a hassle because my software was now technically on a new and different machine. This did not happen however and the activation sailed right through.

I did try and disable the errant driver by the way with the XP install disk, however, it refused to turn it off.
 
I've always had an unnsupported device, I can't figur out what it is...
 
Thanks again for the replies. To answer some of the points -

Bdgr - Up till now I have kept several different W98 Ghost images for our different machines. This was done mainly for convience, not necessity, because under Win 98 you could (if you really wanted) apply an image from say a P3 system to a P1 system. On reboot the OS would find LOTS of things had changed, but ultimately it would adjust itself, load the right drivers, and then be stable. However I would keep different images arround just because it would be much faster and less hassle on reboot. XP, as I said earlier, seems to be MUCH more demanding. I salute you for being able to swap motherboards!

I am very familiar with Ghost Walker, the reason we had to recently upgrade to Ghost Enterprise version 7.5 is that we needed the newer XP-compatible Ghost Walker. For you others who have not heard of it, Ghost Walker is a program that scrambles the SID number so you don't wind up with two identical SIDs on the same NT network. If you do, you can literally crash your NT or 2000 servers. It does less than Microsoft's Sysprep, but seems to work much better from my testing so far.

As for the network we use, we run both Novell and Microsoft networks together, although Novell NDS is our "master" network. We used to be a purely Novell shop but had to introduce NT servers to support a few apps that only run under NT. We now have a motley collection of Netware 4.1, 4.11, 5, NT4, and Win 2000 servers. Keeps our LAN manager busy!


Jdechant - I had not thought of doing a "repair install", I will investgate that. However since the end goal is to be able to quickly copy images onto PCs, having to do any sort of re-install is probably too time consuming to meet the goal.

WATYF - Yes indeed we have our own "corporate" license, so activation is not an issue. Thank God!
 
WATYF said:
I had to do this with a W2K box. I did what was mentioned earlier. Safe Mode > Remove all mobo related devices > Swap everything over to the new board > Run repair CD. When it booted, it detected all the new mobo's components... and voila. :p I had the same install as before, with a new mobo. This should be even easier (and yet harder, at the same time) with XP. Easier, because I've noticed that XP is "smarter" then W2K. I've never had such an easy time with installing hardware as I have since I switched to XP... but also harder, because.. well... for every single one of those installs, you're gonna have to "re-activate" XP. If you have a corporate version, (which I'm hoping you do) then you're lucky and this won't be a problem.. but if you don't.. then have fun waitin' on hold for the next year and a half.. :D

WATYF
Click to expand...

Thats something I absolutely will not do, activate XP. there is a neat little util you run that disables that, and it works quite well. I have NEVER activated one, and of course our work machines now use the corporate version.
 
I might add that for those of you out there who are running stolen versions of XP Pro corporate edition (you know who you are!) you are in for a nasty surprise when XP service pack SP1 comes out. Microsoft has apparently compiled a list of widely stolen corporate license numbers and inserted this into the patch. After you apply the patch and reboot, if you are using one of the stolen numbers it forces a immediate reactivation sequence. If you try to skip it it shuts the machine down. As I like to say, a BIG SORRY...
 
RWhite said:
I might add that for those of you out there who are running stolen versions of XP Pro corporate edition (you know who you are!) you are in for a nasty surprise when XP service pack SP1 comes out. Microsoft has apparently compiled a list of widely stolen corporate license numbers and inserted this into the patch. After you apply the patch and reboot, if you are using one of the stolen numbers it forces a immediate reactivation sequence. If you try to skip it it shuts the machine down. As I like to say, a BIG SORRY...
Click to expand...

LOL. I can just see that now, Our corporate key gets leaked, and becomse one of those widley stolen numbers, We do a push of SP1 to the 20,000 or so machines enterprise wide and all of them grind to a screeching halt, setting back the production of the F22 Raptor and the new F35 Joint Strike fighter.....Costing millions in downtime and billable labor to fix. All of which gets billed directly to the US Air Force. Bill Gates hangs him self in the ensuing shit storm.

I mean, it could happen, but I seriously doubt that they would do this. The class action law suit would hurt even microsoft.
 
You might want to sharpen those lawyers.... :eek:

Actually as the story goes all current corporate users may be automaticly issued new keys, with all current keys becoming null and void. I've heard the story from a few spots, but these guys actually tested the theory out:

http://www.winxpfix.com/Newspage.htm#wkeys
 
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