Re: OT: Motherboard replacement without reinstalling Opsys

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Manuel Castelao wrote:

is it possible to replace a motherboard without
reinstalling the whole Opsys and apps?

Probably, but...
The issue is drivers: various parts of your mobo (and more
depending on how integrated it is; e.g., most modern ones include
the Network Interface Circuits and the SoundCard on the mobo)
will need drivers. How smoothly the operation will go depends on
how close to generic--or not--your existing mobo's components
are, and how close a match the new one's are. Is your VGA
subsystem a separate card or built in to the mobo? A separate
card that you can swap into the new system will work better. The
VGA subsystem is, after all, one of the most essential: you can
fix a scrambled driver for sound or network (Device manager, find
a better driver, feed it the disk that comes with the mobo, and
you should be good to go), but if you cannot see anything on
screen, fixing things will be difficult, to say the least. That
said, I think Windows tends to default to "Generic" when it finds
mismatched drivers. But be sure the new mobo _has_ drivers for W2K.
 
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",
those messages refer to the limit
between a linux swap and a data FAT32 partition

Win Partition tools tend to not know about Linux partitions, and
as Jordan pointed out, that version may be superannuated. Sorry,
but I don't know of a better one. (One reason I have always gone
the install-on-bare-iron route--except, of course, with laptops).
 
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx