URGENT Mobo Help Needed.

[jspeicher]

Hey folks. Like several others here, my ePox8RDA+ died the other day (bad capacitor near RAM). I plan on RMAing it, but I want to get another board off newegg today.

1) Will installing a new board cause me to re-install XP and reformat my HDs? I really don't want to lose what I had on them. Or can I just put it all together and have it boot?

2) I need a good board that is equal/better/affordable than the 8RDA+
I like the nforce2 chipset as well. How are the 400Ultra boards?

Overclocking is not a necessity as I will be putting in a new AMD 2800+

Don't have a ton of money to spend.

 

[Tostada]

If you get the exact same board you can just switch them. If you get a different board (or especially if you get a different chipset), you'll need to reinstall. You don't need to format your drives right away, though. Windows XP does a good job of "repairing the installation." Just install the new board, then boot from the XP CD and tell it to repair the existing installation. It will basically reinstall Windows on top of itself and keep all your old data.

After you do that, you should backup all the stuff on your C: drive, then reinstall again and format the C: drive. You might not have to, but it'll be better that way.

I would get an ABIT NF7-S and put a Mobile Barton in it to save some cash, but any chip will do.

 

[Slink3r]

Tostada - really? I've never had any problems switching out hard drives to new boards, when windows loads it will normally take a few reboots of having to load up all the new drivers, but I've never had a problem switching out motherboards.

 

[boomerang]

People's experience seems to vary widely on this issue. I did a swap running Win95 years ago and the thing blue screened me to death. I tried and tried and eventually just started over.

I've done swaps with 98 that worked and others that didn't.

I've had perfect results numerous times with XP using the repair method.

And just a few days ago, I put a system together outside the case to make sure everything was working. I had what I thought was a formatted HD hooked up and was surprised that it booted up. I found that there was a Win98 installation from a friends computer on the drive from hardware that was about 5 to 6 years old.

I let it do it's thing out of curiosity and it found a bunch of new hardware, wanted a reboot and found some more new hardware and then booted clean right to the desktop. Never prompted for a disk or anything.

I was amazed! I didn't explore any further because I needed to format anyway, but I still can't believe it worked.

 

[SickBeast]

NF7, NF7-S if you can afford it. And overclock, what's wrong with you?

 

[jspeicher]

thanks guys, appreciate the input!

 

[3chordcharlie]

Originally posted by: Slink3r
Tostada - really? I've never had any problems switching out hard drives to new boards, when windows loads it will normally take a few reboots of having to load up all the new drivers, but I've never had a problem switching out motherboards.

by removing ide drivers before making the switch, I've been able to do this with some success, especially back in the 98se days... but there's usually some lingering instability or slow performance as a result. Unless it's the identical motherboard, I suspect the best thing to do is always reinstall.

 

[jspeicher]

installed the ABIT this morning, and both of my HDs were detected and booted fine! WindowsXP did a check on both drives automatically and things are good!