New motherboard, can I get away with not reinstalling O.S.?

[wirelessfender]

I'm going from an ASUS board to an EVGA board but its the same chipset. I know its usually good to reinstall the O.S. when getting a new motherboard and then install the new motherboard drivers and such, but I have too much on my hard drives I'd rather not lose. I'm almost at full capacity on both with valuable data. Is there a way to get around doing this? Can I just uninstall all the motherboard and chipset drivers? What would be the best way to do that?

 

[kamel5547]

Best bet is to reinstall, but you may get away with it (I have before). Just try it, it will either boot or blue screen...

Or you can buy a 3rd HDD and put the OS on that... I generally partition to allow re-installs of the OS fairly easily, its a pretty good practice.

 

[Guest]

Yeah you can get away with it... but do a OS repair before you boot just to make sure you don't get a BSOD

Always back up data before hand though as it may not work out... I have done it before with little hassle so its possible

 

[nolonemo]

If the chipset is the same, it's most likely that you can boot into XP (don't know about Vista) and the computer will go through a process of identifying new hardware and loading drivers. If a new hardware/driver window pops up, tell it to search for drivers and make sure you have the new board driver CD in the drive, Windows should locate and load those drivers too.

 

[spathotan]

In Vista it will be fine. However it would be best to uninstall all the chipset drivers before you put in the new motherboard. Will go much much smoother if the chipsets are of the same (P35, P45, X48.......). However going from say...Intel to Nvidia chipsets is asking for problems.

In either situation a format is best, because the system will always be slugish afterwards if you dont.