Re: OT: Motherboard replacement without reinstalling Opsys

[Peter Cassidy pcassidy@xxxxxxxx]

In the not too distant past, I used to upgrade through motherboard swap
outs at a white box maker local to me who'd replace the motherboard, CPU
and drive. I'd end up looking at exactly the same desktop but on a
larger drive in a new system. It might be worthwhile cloning your hard
drive and mounting it in the new box and seeing if it takes. W2000 might
be more forgiving about this than later OSes. My white box guys had no
trouble swapping up my W2000Pro OS and working environment into a new
system. XP barked at me and I lost functionality in a program when I
upgraded from a 40G to a 300G drive last year but it settled onto the
new 300Ger nicely after a day or so. (Had to do it myself as the white
box guys became integrators and resellers of Dell PCs.) Vista probably
would have automatically called in an air strike on my house. Note: the
software that comes with hard drives now for cloning old data to new
drives has made substantial advances. The last drive I bought for an
interim hardware upgrade - a Western Digital - came with cloning
software that was easier to use than Ghost and had very accessible
instructions, reducing the process to four steps.

Peter

Manuel Castelao wrote:
 
> Excuse me for going definitely off topic but I would like to hear our
> gurus on this matter: is it possible to replace a motherboard without
> reinstalling the whole Opsys and apps? If it is necessary to rebuild
> the whole system, I am not going to spend time I don't have in that
> matter because it's possible to install the opsys again (W2000 in my
> case) but all the programs I am running it's too much (configurations,
> patches, customizations, etc.). I have seen this page
> (http://www.motherboard.windowsreinstall.com/win2k.htm) but I would
> like to receive confirmation that it's good and wise advice before
> getting myself into really hot water (and with no way back). Maybe
> someone on the list has attempted to do that in the past and was
> successful.
> By the way: attempting to prepare the terrain, I ran Partition
> Manager's 8.01 partition info tool and I received these messages:
> "Warning #113: EPBR partition starting at 83538001 overlaps previous
> EPBR partition", "Logical starting at 83538126 is not one head away
> from EPBR" and "extended volume. Error #114: Logical starting at
> 100984653 is not one head away from EPBR". Fortunately, those messages
> refer to the limit between a linux swap and a data FAT32 partition,
> not to the main program partition (C:) but partition magic is
> apparently unable to solve the problem because it sees the whole disk
> as defective and then I can't erase those partitions and create them
> again. Grenier's Test Disk doesn't detect any problem and I have been
> working without any problem for years. Can someone suggest a good
> partition tool to make a further diagnostic?
>
> Thank you very much in advance.
>
> Manuel Castelao