New build except for harddrive, do i need to reinstall XP

[Qman]

Quick question, I’m upgrading my system and only reusing my hard drive, DVD drive and CD Drive and Sound blaster sound card. My question is, should i be able to just plug in my new mother board, graphics card, and RAAM to my hard drive and just fire it up. I can see driver install and such but should i be ok with out wiping the hard drive? Any advice would be great!

 

[PaCanc]

Well, give it a try, but expect problems on first boot. Maybe even a freeze on Windows load, or a blue screen.

But if it gets into Windows, I guess you can uninstall the old hardware/drivers and install the new ones.

Maybe it's safer to try booting in Safe Mode, so the drivers don't load.

 

[everett]

Yes, you will need to do fresh install.

 

[Qman]

Hey, thanks allot everyone. I was hoping to avoid all the reinstall of my games and patches, but if it save me headaches in the future than its worth doing it right now!

 

[freak1982]

MrsBytch is right.

I have tried this several times with the machines at work. It never works, mainly the motherboard is what causes the problems. Even starting in safe mode doesnt.

Just a reminder Make sure you backup anything important before doing anything. Would be worth doing a fresh rebuild anyway as the drivers etc will all still be there.

Freak1982

 

[gomerpile]

your right it never works right I've tried too I was able to get xp working to save data.

 

[jitpublisher]

It's best to do a fresh install, all the old drivers can cause problems with the new drivers. If you can get it to work, you usually end up with a long boot time, and other random flakiness just because your registry becomes so bloated with needless entries from your previous build.

I have done this with windows 98 by going into the device manager right before you migrate the harddrive to the new system, and uninstall the drivers for everything relating to your motherboard like the CPU, chipset, drive controllers....pretty much everything in there. Start with the minor entries first, working your way up to the processor as the last thing. Then when you reboot with your new system you are going to get a long series of "new hardware detected" and a lot of reinstalling, requiring a lot of rebooting before you get through it all.

I don't know how well this will work with XP though, and I still say format and fresh install is the best route.

 

[sluzbenik]

There's a chance in hell it might work IF right before you move the hard drive, you uninstall EVERY single device driver for the motherboard - everything.

I saved my system drive when I moved from a P4PE Pentium IV to a C2D, and it actually boots and the desktop comes up in low-res, as well as a gazillion errors and "unknown device" messages and for some reason my USB mouse no longer works. I didn't actually uninstall the drivers, I just booted right into it.

Since I have no need for it I didn't spent any time trying to repair it...

 

[jitpublisher]

Pulling a drive with the OS from 1 build and dropping into another quite different build is like'n to a severe case of the following scenerio-
"I had an Nvidia GPU, and I removed it, installed an ATI GPU. I didn't remove the Nvidia drivers or load the ATI drivers yet. My new ATI GPU is just not perfoming or working correctly. Anyone have any ideas?"