Swapping motherboards...Painfull?????

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mccamli

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Nov 26, 2007
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Hi,

I'm swapping an MSI P965 Platinum for a new Gigabyte GA-P35_ds4 and was hoping it would be a relatively painless process.

Someone just told me it was likely to be a painful process and would require a re-format and re-installation of Vista. Is that true?

I'm running two identical hard drives with RAID (I think C: is set to Raid 0? (for speed?) and D: to RAID 5? (for duplication of data?)

The question is do I have to erase and re-format everything or can I just plug it all in, tell the BIOS the disks are configured for RAID and fire her up then install the motherboard drivers???

Gut feel tells me this could be messy.... :ouch:

Thanks in advance.

Ian
 
Further Information...

The MSI board uses Intel ICH8R SATA RAID and the newer Gigabyte board uses Intel ICH9R SATA RAID. Likely to be compatible???
 
I upgraded from an MSI Neo2 to a P965-DS4, and I didn't expect it to work, but I plugged the drives into the same slots (as in, the drive in SATA0 on the old board I plugged in to SATA0 on the new board) and then configured the settings to be the same in bios... BOOM! Worked first time. I was a bit cautious initially, but it's been like that for about a year now, without problems. Very nice :)

I think I upgraded the "inf" file thingy... That was it. Just try it, you can't lose any data.

*EDIT - Just to remove ambiguity, I am talking about two HDDs in a RAID0 config.
 
I've definitely always reinstalled windows after adding a new motherboard. you shouldn't have to reformat your hard drives. at least i don't think so. it's always best to start off fresh if you can with the motherboard incase of driver conflicts. i guess the best possible course of action is to reformat but you could try just a reinstall and see how you get on and if you start to get any instability you could think more about a reformat as well.

gonna do this myself soon as I've bought a new motherboard. think i'm going to go for the reformat route but then that's just me and i like to start fresh if i can to get rid of any crap that's accumulated on my hard drive.
 
I should mention that I got a whole bunch of errors on Windows startup, so I just reinstalled over the top. So from first power-on to functioning windows took about 30 minutes, and then Windows looked and ran just as it had before... Which was nice.
 
Thanks guys,

It sounds like a re-install is the go (assuming I can get the thing to boot up). I'd prefer not to have to re-format because I've been a bit sloppy and have got quite a bit of other stuff on my C drive. I'll have a go tomorrow and let you know how it goes.

Thanks
 
Yeah... I had a bunch of errors until I reinstalled.... But I didn't format. So once the installation was complete, Windows worked perfectly without complaints. So I didn't have to reinstall everything from scratch. Which was nice. I use Photoshop and have a whole BUNCH of personalised settings/filters etc, and I didn't cherish the prospect of reconfiguring it all after a clean install. Thank god for backwards compatibility between the ICHR8 and 9, I say! 😀
 
LOL! if you have been married and divorced, a great comparison is clean it allll out and start anew. Old underwear in the corner that the ol' one wouldn't deal with won't cut it with a new one!!

Been married 23 years first one, but I could imagine starting anew, bad thoughts.............
 
The scary part for me is your RAID setup.
If it was not for the raid, you would likely not have much of a problem at all.

Perhaps you would need to reinstall a couple drivers, but for the most part it should be fine.

I've worked in the past with companies on setting up single Windows Images to work across a myriad number of different systems so I know it can be done and the pain is not normally that great.

However, bum raid drivers can easily destroy all of your data.
 
I will second all who said backup anything you want to keep. RAID can be fickle, and you will loose your data if things go awry. Reconstructing a damaged array will be a messy and expensive undertaking.
 
Vista my see your new motherboard as another computer and want to be activated again.
I did a swap of a motherboard with win xp pro and it worked ok for about 3 months, but I did need to reformat and install. Of course the motherboard was a force 4 board upgrading from a force 3 board. Some of the drivers had to be redone.
But a finicky as vista is I would just plane on a reformat and reinstall.
 
i bought a new motherboard from a low lvl gigabyte to the one i have now backed up all my files and stuff ready to reinstall xp but i didn't have to all i had to to was reinstall my drivers and i was away
 
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