Moving a windows installation from a single processor to a new mobo and c2d. How?

March 8, 2007 10:46 AM

Moving a windows xp installation from a single processor to a new mobo and c2d. How?

I've moved windows installtions before between similiar motherboards and only had to remove the motherboard driver, video driver, and sound driver. Windows would boot up, detect the new equipment, and run. I would then have to re-install some drivers.

Now I'm moving from an AMD based system (via board, athlon) to a intel core duo running on an asrock with the via PT880 Ultra chipset.

Is it possible to move my installtion to this platform? I'm guessing my current method won't work and I will have to do an in-place repair install. Has anyone tried moving an XP install like this? Any suggestions? Thanks.

posted by the ghost of Ken Lay to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Here is a site that describes it, the important point being the repair install. It works most of the time, but I've had some systems reject the process, so backup..

There are a few previous questions about this as well, here's one:

Swap motherboard - Will Windows work ok?
October 7, 2005 12:29 PM
posted by Chuckles at 11:00 AM on March 8, 2007

From what I know, Microsoft considers a new motherboard a new computer and you are required to get a new windows license.
posted by nonstopflights at 11:01 AM on March 8, 2007

Chuckles is on the right track. I've done this a few times. nonstopflights may be thinking of restricted OEM licenses, but the most that's going to happen is you'll be asked to re-authenticate, which is no big deal. It's the same authentication "phone home" you do by Internet whenever installing XP.

The point of the Repair Install method is to build a new Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) under your installation, so that you can take advantage of your new 2x cpu chip. You may want to prepare to do all this by making a slipstream with SP2, if your original installation media didn't include it, too, because downgrading to SP1 during the Repair Install can bork your upgrade.
posted by paulsc at 11:10 AM on March 8, 2007

Here is the KB article, which is a readable version of what paulsc linked to.
posted by damn dirty ape at 11:57 AM on March 8, 2007

Congrats on the new system.

The others here have given good advice but don't hesitate to clean boot your computer after the dust has settled. I've found a lot of gunk gets associated with the drivers and the only real solution is to start from scratch.
posted by jmprice at 1:38 PM on March 8, 2007