New board advice needed

[BarneyBoots]

Managed to fry my EVGA NFORCE 680i SLI MB last week and got the "double dash error" and now it will not even start its post cycle.After attempting various fixes I have deciced to get a new board.I currently have a CORE 2 DUO EXTREME 2.66GHZ QX6700 8M cpu and would like something that is compatible.

Any ideas I quite fancy the Asus P5Q Pro Turbo Intel P45 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard.
Would this be compatible and would I have to reinstall windows,in a perfect world I would like not to and have read that when upgrading you can sometimes get away with it.

Any ideas ?

 

[WJA96]

Unfortunately they are totally different chipsets and worst of all the HDD controllers are completely different so it will almost certainly not even start Windows.

You will almost certainly need to do a clean install.

I'm going to skip the bit about having a backup and suggest you buy a second hard drive and install a clean version of the operating system on that, then copy your files across from the original drive.

 

[BarneyBoots]

Fair enough,as long as it supports the cpu thats the main thing.Expected to have to reinstall anyway.
Thanks for the advice.

 

[G_Wizz]

If you go into the control panel and make sure the IDE controllers are set to "Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE controller" instead of "Nvidia NForce Serial ATA Controller" you should be ok, done it many times myself without re installing.

For extra safety once you have done the above reboot into safe mode and use Driver Cleaner Pro to remove all traces of the Nvidia Chipset software, then shut down and change the MB.

 

[BarneyBoots]

Thats the thing though,I cannot even get it to start its post cycle never mind boot into windows to change the IDE controllers.

 

[BarneyBoots]

Few more quick questions if anybody can help.

I was dual booting with xp and windows 7.The xp version was OEM and I only have a recovery disc for that.Is there any way I can install both the oem version and the retail version of windows 7 and regain my dual boot ? I always thought that a oem version was locked to the motherboard ?

I also make backups every week with Acronis True Image,am I right in assuming that these are useless as it would have backed up all the motherboard drivers etc and would not restore correctly if I had changed the motherboard.

So am I right in assuming that I am looking at reinstalling windoiws 7 and all my programs etc from scratch and losing xp ?

 

[WJA96]

XP OEM is only to be used on 1PC. You can definitely replace the motherboard and re-install in this case.