PCA Forums

One of these days I plan on changing motherboards when AMD's Hammer comes out. From what I hear the first Hammer is supposed to be at 2.6 Gigs (rated 3400) or something like that. I will surely have to have another motherboard to support it.

I have Windows XP Pro.

Has anyone changed out a motherboard in Windows XP? I have done it a few times in Windows 98 and it worked out OK without having to re-install or clean install the OS.

I had heard all kinds of comments of things to do in Windows 98 like take out all the periphrials, etc.
I never did that. I did go into the registry and delete the enum key in Hkey Local Machine, change out the MB and it always worked.

I would think that Windows XP should be able to handle it with ease.

I would love to hear any experiences from anyone who has done it with XP and please list how you did it. Thanks

Ya - on my LAN party box I went from an AMD 751 Irongate chipset mobo to a VIA chipset mobo - two completely different chipsets, and XP (much to my suprise) handled it beautifully.

The only thing thjat might be a problem is if one mobo addresses the HDD controller as a SCSI controller (as many of the on-board RAID mobos do) and the other doesn't. XP may give you the "Inaccessible Device" error because the hard drive controller's hardware address is different.

Never dealt with that yet on an XP system but sometimes you can fix that on a Win2K system by booting with the Win2K CD and doing a repair on the boot sectors (you need to have the HDD controller's driver handy on a floppy).

Using XP I changed from an Epox to another Epox and back to the first Epox and then to 2 shuttle mobo's and never had to format.

I just started up with each mobo change with the basics and added in each peripheral one at a time. At first of course windows may ask for the xp cd and go through the normal reboots, but each time it was very smooth and no problem.

Did it with one having raid but since I don't use raid I just disabled that.

From my experience, XP is by far the easier to change mobo's than 98. Never tried it with win2k.

That's good to hear. Now I just have to wait for the Hammer to get here.

I'm not interested in RAID so I shouldn't have to deal with what TFP was saying about that.