Changing Motherboards

Fanny Cradock

I'm changing my CPU from socket 754 to socket 939; this means that I need to get a new motherboard. My question is: how is the best way of making the change over? Should i delete all traces of the old bios from my hard drive and then hook my hard drive etc to it, or should i leave things as they are, removing the old only software when i have the new motherboard installed?

Old motherboard is an ASUS K8V Series (KV I think) http://uk.asus.com/products4.aspx?l1=3&l2=14&l3=0&model=1189&modelmenu=1

New mobo is an A8N-SLI Deluxe http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=319951

daywalker

if you are doing something major as changing cpu/motherboard its always recommended to do a full reinstall of windows, this reduces the chances of running into any driver problems or conflicts.

This is especially true since both motherboards have totally different chipsets

Fanny Cradock

Crap, I though it was going to come to this. I'm going to need to borrow an external HDD, but I wont be able to do this until the weekend. In the meantime I'm going to try and go ahead with the installation of the new mobo and cpu (with a view to doing a full reinstall sometime this/ next week). What's the best approach for the stopgap installation/ upgrade.

Max_Damage

I changed my motherboard before, and I didn't bother re-installing Windows. Computer works fine, in fact, I never deleted anything from my HD when changing the motherboards.

8T8

If you follow this guide you should be able to have a perfectly stable system without having to format & re-install.

Boiling it down your basically neutralizing the drivers so no conflict can occur once the swap has been made you can now install the chipset specific drivers.

You are going to be switching from a VIA to an NVIDIA system so you will be wanting to remove VIA chipset drivers.

At most you should only have to uninstall the VIA chipset drivers from add/remove and make sure that the IDE/SATA controllers are using the "standard dual channel PCI IDE controller" driver. Check system devices in the device manager for anything VIA specific as well just in case. Also the fact that it's AMD/VIA/PCI-e to AMD/NVIDIA/PCI-e lessens the amount of tweaking required but dont forget to uninstall drivers for other peripherals as well e.g sound, ethernet etc.

{Do back up your important data before doing any of this}

Fanny Cradock

Brilliant link! Thanks 8t8. One question though: can I do this after I replace the mobo etc with the new hardware? The reason I ask is because someone is coming to collect the old hardware tonight and I'd like to show that it's working fine. If I start uninstalling drivers and the thing doesn't work, it wouldn't look so good!

8T8

No the drivers must be removed before making the swap, you could risk it by limiting the number of drivers being uninstalled but that's not something I'd recommend.

You could demo the system as working and then ask them to wait a few minutes while you uninstall the drivers. All you have to do is identify the drivers in question and check to see what can be uninstalled through the add/remove control panel.

The critical one is the IDE/SATA controller if that is already running as a "standard dual channel PCI IDE controller" then you can save a lot of time by doing that before the demo as the system will still be fully operational.

Fanny Cradock

Yeah, i think it's best if i do that. A few minutes work could save me a whole lot of hassle!


PS Are you are sure that removing the IDE/SATA drivers wont interfere with the opperation of the system (including the graphics card)?

8T8

As long as you are not running a RAID array off the controllers it should be perfectly fine, my own nForce 4 SATA controllers run as the standard PCI IDE one.

Fanny Cradock

I'm unsure if I am or not (I would guess probably not). This is where my technical knowledge begins to get stretched. Maybe it's best if I wait. Just in case...

Cheers 8T8

8T8

A RAID array is where you combine hard drives for specific purposes such as redundancy or performance.

If your drives are operating as standalone normal HD's then they are not in a RAID array.

Fanny Cradock

That would be a no then!

Thanks again

Fanny Cradock

I realise that it's there in picture form, but i cant figure out how to replace the bus master drivers with the standard generic drivers. In the link that 8T8 provided I can get to the "device manager" and "VIA BUS Master IDE Controller Properties" window, but i cant figure out how to get to the "hardware update wizard" to change to the "standard dual channel PCI IDE Controller". Any ideas?



EDIT

i think i answered my own question

8T8

Click on the driver tab, select update driver, select (advanced) pick the don't search I will choose the driver to install, you should see the PCI/IDE controller listed as an option.

Fanny Cradock

I managed to figure that out after a bit of playing around. thanks

irlrobins

Moving to Build/Upgrade forum