OS reinstall obligatory when mobo swapped?

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wizzackr

[H]ard|Gawd
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May 5, 2000
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The mainboard of my old computer crapped out on me last week. I now received a new one and wondered what happened if I just fired up the old WinXP install. Of course it'd go caddy wompus on me for the first boot, but then what? Would I be ok if I just installed all new drivers?

Never tried and I'll probably reinstall anyways - just a curiosity thing...
 
I always take every oportunity to purge my hard drive and start anew. However, you will be fine if you just install all your hardware on the new motherboard and boot up. Windows will detect a whole slew of new hardware (chipsets, controlers, etc). If you have any undetected hardware (look for yellow exclamation point signs in the System/Hardware tab of the Control Panel), then you'll need to install drivers for your motherboard.
 
To be honest, when I swapped between my Asrock board to an Asus board, I got nothing but bluescreens... Instantly. If you NEED to preserve your data, go grab a cheap 3.5" external HD enclosure and hook it up to another computer somewhere.
 
An obligatory OS reinstall primarily comes as a result of how the Hard Drive was setup on the earlier MB.

For example, perhaps you setup a RAID array with an earlier SiI chipset and have now an nForce4 or 5xx based motherboard. The RAID drivers will change significantly and the OS is unable to load.

If you have had a default IDE or SATA configuration instead, you may be able to boot and have it detect the hardware changes. However, sometimes you'll find that it holds onto resources for hardware that no longer exists, so a driver cleaner can help.

Personally, I simply resinstall from scratch as I've always found that there can be a big difference in performance when legacy driver droppings exist from the older setup.
 
Thanks for the reply, guys - I'll reinstall from scratch then... after I tried it our for giggles ;)
 
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