Moving XP to new motherboard

[zinman]

My motherboard failed unexpectedly recently so I've just upgraded to an Asus A8N-E with Athlon64 CPU and 1G RAM. My system drive was (and is) a 120G SATA with several partitions, including 8G for Windows XP. There is a full backup image on another partition. When I booted the new system last night, it couldn't find XP so I first tried Repair Install, then Recovery Console, but neither could find the OS. Then I used Startup Recovery Manager and "successfully" restored the backup image to an unallocated section of C:, but it still can't find XP on boot-up. What else can I try to get XP recognized without doing a clean install? If I have to do a clean install, are the other partitions on the drive likely to be affected?

[tachyon42]

See transferring image to another computer (http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=91679) - since this is effectively what you are doing when you change hardware such as a motherboard.

[TheQuest]

Hi, zinman

How have you set it to boot, in the BIOS.

You must make sure your serial Ports and DMA Transfer is set enabled [Ports 1 & 2 are a must]

Advanced>Onborad Devices Configuration

IDE Funcion Setup>

Serial Port 1, 2 [Enabled]

SATA DMA Transfer [Enabled]

Also check:-
BOOT>Boot drive Priority, making sure nothing is disableld. [thats needed]

Take Care,
TheQuest 8)

[djmorgan]

Having gone through the same thing not so long ago I can only advise that you are putting off the enevitable.

A clean install will eventually force it self upon you regardless, the os loads chipset specific drivers for the mobo you are using, when you put in a new mobo xp will again loaded drivers for that specific chipset however, the old ones hang around, your registry gets bigger, mine was 53 megs! and eventually you'll find delayed boots and other non specific problems.

In my case I was able to move from an ASUS to Abit board and the system booted after a fashion, then got better then got a lot worst, after about 3 months just stopped until I did a fresh install, glad I did now as the whole thing flies!

TI helps in saving programs but of course the registry settings are no good. :-\

[zinman]

OK people, I'm convinced that a clean install is inevitable. (Even though I have better things to do this weekend....)
Please refresh my memory: Will XP setup give me the option to choose which partition to use for the install? I don't want to overwrite all the other partitions on my large drive.

Thanks.

[tachyon42]

Just to be safe - use TI to image all the partitions before reinstall of OS.

[TheQuest]

Hi, zinman

-{ Quote: "Please refresh my memory: Will XP setup give me the option to choose which partition to use for the install? " }-
Yes, you are given the choice of which Partition and whether too reformat it or not by Windows.

Take Care,
TheQuest 8)