Changing chipset and keeping my old Windows

taizo

Honorable
Nov 27, 2012
10
0
10,510
I didn't know if this was the right place to post, but I figured that the basis of my issue revolves around my new motherboard, so I figured I wouldn't get in too much trouble for putting this here.

For the past couple of years I've been using an ASUS P8H61-M LE/CSM mATX board which has housed an old Sandy Bridge i3 (the model number escapes me) which I later upgraded to a 3770K. For Christmas I asked for and received an ASRock Pro4 Z77 which, of course, has the chipset that the 3770K was actually designed for. I also received an Intel 240 gig SSD as an upgrade from my 6 year old 230 gig hard drive.

My original intention was to simply use the software that Intel supplied to "migrate" my entire drive over after installing the old disk into the new board. Up until this point I had no idea that one couldn't simply run a version of Windows which had been installed on a machine with a different chipset.

So what I've ended up doing is backing up my old disk with the old motherboard onto a partition of my internal terabyte storage disk. I figured that it would be useless to actually create a disk image as, if I tried to restore it, I wouldn't be able to run Windows because of the outdated install. I've re-installed Windows on the SSD and everything is happy on my new board. I plan on calling Microsoft in the morning to get the key updated, but it's unfortunate as I will have to re-install every single one of my programs, not to mention dealing with all of my saves for my huge Steam library.

All of this is just a pain and would really be smoothed out if there were some way that I could simply keep using my old disk image or somehow update that image's Windows install... Not to mention it would probably be healthier for the SSD; to get it all done at once instead of over an extended period of time.

Anyway, kind of convoluted, but I hope that I've given y'all enough information so that somebody can think of some kind of solution, because it would be nice to get this all done in one neat step. Otherwise, it looks as though I'll be spending the next few days moving over everything manually.

Hope everybody's having a good holiday.
 
Solution
The best way is to do a fresh install as you're doing. The pain of reinstalling and tranferring save game files is less that the alternative. And seeing how you are half way there, that just reinforces it. Keep going, you're doing the right thing.
The steps for migrating over to windows 7 are too cumbersome for me. Windows should configure the old drive as secondary automatically if you're using the pro or ultimate version of windows in achi mode so you can use your old xp files. Don't know if the home version will do it.
 

abbadon_34

Distinguished
The best way is to do a fresh install as you're doing. The pain of reinstalling and tranferring save game files is less that the alternative. And seeing how you are half way there, that just reinforces it. Keep going, you're doing the right thing.
 
Solution