Replaced motherboard can i reinstall hard drives without loosing data

[purdy64]

Hello,
I have a HP m9500t that the motherboard died on. The one used was a Asus IPIBL-LB. Same as Benicia-GL8E. I removed the two harddrives and installed a blank HD. Shipped to HP for the repair - out of warranty of course. What I am hopeing to do is when I get it back to remove new HD and reinstall old HD's without loosing anything. Will this be possible? The OS is Vista Ultimate 64 Bit

 

[tecmo34]

If you have the same motherboard being returned, you should be able to "plug-n-play" with the old hard drive without issuses. If it is a new motherboard, you may have issues with compatiblilty of the old BIOS & Drivers.

 

[purdy64]

Iff there are issues with the bios and drivers. Could I reload drivers from some utility program for the correct one(s). What HP wanted was to install new MB and reformat HD's. It was agreed upon that I remove HD's and install a blank HD. Thus keeping all files,programs etc...

 

[tecmo34]

Your best bet would be go into Safe Mode and use a program like DriveSweeper. You would want to remove all previous motherboard drivers and re-install the new drivers upon re-boot.

If issues still there, I would boot into the Windows Disk and do a repair, which should fix any "master boot" issues.

 

[jaquith]

I would suggest having ALL the drivers for the 'new' MOBO ready and install them when you first boot; place them on a CD/DVD. I assume you don't have the complexity of a RAID, and you'll probably boot fine with your Device Manager full of {!} and/or {?} which you'll need to update. Insert the CD/DVD and update.

The process should be straight forward; putting Good vibes out there for you!