swaping mainboard

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bobolocks

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I wish to swap my mainboard and AMD K6-3 with a Celeron based setup. I want to keep everything else if possible... Gadget 8|24, harddrive and all data, CD burner, etc. Is this something a junior pro rookie can pull off? Will my system reboot after the swap? Any info is greatly appreciated.
 
If only it were that easy ;-)
I am pretty sure you will have to reformat your hard-drive as well.
 
why would he have to reformat his drive? I've done this sort of thing before.

ametth
 
ok,ok Ive done this before.... and its easy. You get your new board (make sure your parts are compatible) and switch all the parts. Boot up. Windows will hopefully recognise and install the drivers for your new motherboard resources. thats it.

xoxox
 
Yes, yes. I was thinking of the ABIT mainboard and Celeron 566 sugested in the "Roll your own" article. The PCchips board and AMD I have now has been a serious recording headache.
 
You'll be extrememly lucky if windows pulls itself back up without any trouble. If you attempt this, try removing all hardware from your device manager first (including motherboard resources). Don't reboot or anything, just get rid of it all, do the swap, restart, and cross your fingers.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Thanks Slack, The guys at Gadget lab say my existing case may not be ATX type. How do I know? I believe I have a socket 7 mainboard. They say this type uses a older case and power supply. If I had more money I would put some explosives in my case just to watch it blow up then I would roll my own.
 
No need for explosives (unless you fail...)

First, you CAN swap motherboards and have your system come up. I have done it quite a bit (I do PC tech work plus I have 6 PCs at home). I'll try to keep this short. You didn't say what OS you have but I'll assume some flavor of Win95/Win98. Win98 has improved plug-n-pray so it is a bit easier but things will also work under Win95. First thing is to back up your hard drive if possible, at least your critical files. Next thing to do BEFORE swapping is if you are using any sort of special IDE disk driver (sometimes called "Bus Mastering driver") you want to unload it, since your new board will be different. You do this through control panel. Then power down and swap your board. When you boot up, immediately go into the system BIOS (usually done by hitting the DELETE key). You will find a utility for "autodetecting" your IDE hard drives. Run that and make sure it sees all hard drives. Then manually configure floppie drives and time of day. Finally look for a BIOS setting that indicates whether you have a Plug'N'Play operating system. Make sure that says YES. Then save settings and restart the system.

If everything is cool in the BIOS the system will boot. It may seem like all hell is breaking loose because you will see a bunch of messages that Windows is finding all kinds of hardware. This is because the IRQs and addresses of your plug'n'play hardware will be different. Most likely you will not need to re-install any drivers because they are already there, the system will just shuffle the hardware settings. Just in case you may wish to have the hardware driver disks handy. After a while it will finish and everything should be fine.

As to your second question, AT motherboards are somewhat square and rarely have any ports directly on them except the keyboard - serial and parallel ports are connected by wires to a slot cover or port. ATX motherboards are very rectangular and have parallel/serial/keyboard/mouse ports all poking directly out of the case. The power supply connections are different too, so you can't put one kind of board in the other kind of case. However cases are cheap - $30/40 for a ATX mid-tower case.

Hope that answers your questions and good luck.
 
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