Motherboard Upgrade, clarification needed...

This may seem simple, but it has never crossed my mind as to how to upgrade a mobo without wiping my system. I have always done it, what seems to be, the hard way.

I copy files I want onto CD, for use onto the new system.

Hook up the new mobo and components (using old Hard drive), and reload the OS.

When I have tried to upgrade the Mobo before without wiping it always gives me some boot error.

In the back of my mind I am saying... do I need to uninstall the mobo drivers and anything associated before I hook up the new mobo?? Thereby being able to have a new mobo/processor without wiping my hard drive everytime.

Would this be correct? If so, I may be making this much harder than it should be.

I don't recall the error, perhaps as stated in an earlier post it is an NTDLR issue... that sounds familiar.

Reason I am asking, I am looking to upgrade my Mobo and Processor, but wanted to know a better/more efficient way to do this than reformatting everytime.

Hope my inability to accomplish this gives some of you amusement at least. Thanks in advance for your time.

Changing motherboards is like moving the hdd to another computer. In all likelyhood it won't boot, because there are just too many little settings and dependancies between your hardware and windows. You might be able to repair the windows install if you have a real cd (change mobo, boot from cd, repair installation) but you would still want to back everything up beforehand. Really, if you are doing such a major upgrade as a motherboard, just figure you'll have to reformat.

When I upgraded from a KT133 chipset to a KT333 chipset I didn't have to do anything at all. XP Pro booted up fine. Thing is, though, that both chipsets run the same drivers. And I kept the same hardware except for RAM. I ended up re-installing a few months later just for peace of mind.

If you're going to a completely different chipset you better start all over again.

I have a P2 board and processor how can I up grade it to P3 without changing the motherboard

You can start by making your own thread to ask questions, rather than hijacking someone else's.
P2 and P3 are slot 1 cpus, so you should be able to just put in a P3. Check your mobo specs to be sure.

It is possible to change motherboards without re-formatting. But you will probably need to uninstall just about all the drivers from the control panel beforehand, and re-install when the new board is in.

You will more than likely get plenty of problems using WinXP - possibly due to the 'protection' built into it.

However, I upgraded from a Soltek KT333 based board to an MSI KT600 based board using Win2K and VIA hyperion drivers without much problem. Even managed to uninstall Nvidia based TI4200 card and install Radeon 9600 without problems. A good registry tool is also useful!

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