[SOLVED] Changing motherboard

[Habil21]

Hi,

I've got a HP pavilion 15-ab291sa with an i5-6200u. I've bought a motherboard with an i7-6500 and 940m Nvidia GPU.

I'm wondering if I can just plug in the hard drive and the rest of the hardware and start the laptop up, or do I need to wipe the hard drive and reinstall windows. Or is it just a matter of updating the drivers after changing the motherboard?

Thanks.

 

[Lutfij]

You should reinstall the OS from scratch alongside all the drivers due to the platform change inspite of being within Intel's camp.

 

[Habil21]

Ok, i plan on doing that, but the old motherboard is fried and I want to recover some files from it. To reinstall the OS from scratch nd recover the files would it be ok to start it up?

 

[USAFRet]

Ok, i plan on doing that, but the old motherboard is fried and I want to recover some files from it. To reinstall the OS from scratch nd recover the files would it be ok to start it up?

It might not even boot up in the new system.

 

[DSzymborski]

Yup. Important files ought to be backed up, for many, many reasons. One of them is for situations like this.

At this point, I'd get an external hard drive enclosure, take out the laptop's hard drive, and back up the files to another PC. Then you can safely wipe the drive and reinstall Windows on the laptop. It's kind of a pain, but you skipped an important part of PC upkeep and in terms of neglecting backups, this is one of the least bad outcomes.

 

[Habil21]

I got the laptop for free because the motherboard had been water damaged. I've had the HDD (sata disk) tested and it is fine.

The shop I took the hard drive to told me the RAM and the WiFi card would be fine, they didn't test them.

If I try to start the laptop up without resetting the hard drive could it currupt the BIOS or any other chips?

Sorry for not including all the info in my first post, bit of a newbie to this.

Thanks

 

[USAFRet]

You can try it.
It might work, but don't be surprised if it fails.

 

[USAFRet]

If there is actual critical data on that drive that you need, it is best to try to copy that off to some other drive first.

 

[Habil21]

Thanks for all the replies, I'll get the data transferred and reinstall the OS.