Swapping mobo in Win2k machine, any way to "keep" installation?

Soldato
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Customers computer is at deaths door and they've bought a basic system (from here!) and a windows XP licence (to use the backwards compatability of the xp/2k licence and stay legit)

What do i need to do/uninstall/disable to be able to put the drive in the new machine and get win2k running again.

Once it's running happily i'll be copying the info over to the 80gig sata drive that came with the machine.

Cheers
 
(edit) ^^^ That's much better than my way!

It all depends... the short answer is that it can't really be done.

In my experience if you're going from an Intel system to another Intel system... (and I would guess it works for AMD too) you can fool it by swapping the drive over and then letting it tell you that the drivers aren't quite right and need to be updated.

If you change processor brands it will be toasted.

Does 2k have a "copy user settings" utility on the disk?
That might go some way to copying the desktop, start menu and links.

Another option is to put a second install on and try to repair the first one with the drivers and settings from the new one. - This worked for me when I crashed my install, but didn't want to start from scratch.
 
Last edited:
:p i did :p

Did the driver clean, the ACPI turnoff, turned off ACPI in the new mobo, then tried to boot and it still goes BSOD :(
 
SB118 said:
:p i did :p

Did the driver clean, the ACPI turnoff, turned off ACPI in the new mobo, then tried to boot and it still goes BSOD :(

ah sorry.... :o

can you boot into safe mode? remove the ide controller drivers in device manager and reboot. :)
 
can you put the drive back in the old machine. boot up. then remove the ide controller drivers. then back into the new pc. i've since deleted that link from my bookmarks as it should say this. :o
 
hoo-ra!

Turns out just uninstalling the old mobo ide drivers wasn't enough, had to switch it over the generic EISA/ISA drivers before chucking it into the other machine.

Happy day :D
 
Has Vista fixed this age-old issue?

It always gives me horrors when I need to replace a motherboard or boot RAID card in Windows.

Theres surely only a few settings/drivers determining the initial boot configuration that need to be changed, shame Microsoft never tells anyone.

I like the Linux way :
1) take out old motherboard, raid array, and cpu
2) put in new motherboard, raid array (cloned with same data), and cpu
3) *ding* it works!
 
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