Change motherboard. No need to reinstall XP?!

[Guest]

So my computer died a few weeks ago. The motherboard would not put out AGP video. I ordered a different mobo from Ebay and stuck it in. Still no go. Went through hell pinning down the what was wrong but in the end it turned out I had 3 additional problems. The memory wasn't compatible. The power supply was bad. My DVD writer was bad so I couldn't reinstall XP.

I replaced all the components and reinstalled XP on some crappy 40 GB spare drive I had. I then took my raid card and hard drives that had my old XP install and programs, data, etc and plugged it in. To my surprise it started to boot off it. I'm not sure how since the new mobo had no option to boot from SCSI first.

Well guess what? Windows booted and found a bunch of new hardware, auto loaded the drivers for some and I was looking at my desktop! I manually installed the other drivers and I am good to go.

What are the odds of that? Man I'm lucky!

[Sp0iLedBrAt]

What are the odds of that? Man I'm lucky!

Yes, you are

Especially taking into consideration all the steps people take to even remotely get close to what you did

[Tripredacus]

It is definately possible. As long as the HAL and Mass Storage driver are the same (or compatible) you can replace a board and not have to reinstall XP. I've even had such luck with Windows 98.

[allen2]

I didn't reinstall my xp for a motherboard swap since about 2005. Most of the time didn't need to do anything except when i swapped and enabled ahci. All i need was use driver injection Gui to replace the old mass storage driver. Also as for the graphics card , i always buy an nvidia, i don't even need to reinstall those drivers. The only drivers i need to reinstall are sound and network.

Last time i reinstalled XP since 2005 was because i had controlset going from 1 to 25 in the registry due to a strange behavior of smart array P400 controller. I didn't want to see at how many controlset XP wouldn't boot anymore.

[Phenomic]

I took out a defective Asus 790gx and replaced it with Gigabyte 890gx and XP continued to work after calling home to re-activate.

[marcusj0015]

the same thing happend to me with my sisters laptop

her laptop has x86 my dekstop had x64 both Windows 7, she had an AMD cpu, my desktop had an Intel CPU, i used DDR3 she used DDR2, it was a world different, like day and night, then i put her hdd in, and my computer started booting off it for some reason, and it worked!

it didnt have Aero, becasue different GPU's, but it worked fine, i was suprised as hell!

maybe that's a hidden feature of Windows 7?

[Tripredacus]

it didnt have Aero, becasue different GPU's, but it worked fine, i was suprised as hell!

maybe that's a hidden feature of Windows 7?

RAM speed doesn't mean anything to Windows (usually) and if both CPUs were MPs then that would make sense. The reason Aero wasn't available likely was because you didn't have the correct video driver installed or the video controller didn't have enough memory or support that feature.

[candela]

What I have experienced, is that as long as the replacement board has a similar chipset as the one being replaced, windows does not have to be repaired. You do not need to re-instal Xp in order to prevent a blue screen due to a diff MB. Windows XP has a repair option that you can use and won't lose any proggies, etc..