Upgrading From Celeron to TBird

[jlbigguy]

Need some advice:

I am upgrading from a Celeron 450 to a TBird 900. My 30GB hard drive contains Windows Me. It would be great if I could simply place the drive in the Tbird PC, without having to reformat it.

Since the system was setup for an Intel BX Motherboard, will I have any problems once the drive is placed in the TBird PC? I assume that plug and play will set the proper drivers, as will the CD that comes with the motherboard.

Should I just bite the bullet and reformat the drive in the new system?

Thanx for any help.

 

[ledzepp98]

there's a good chance you will have some problems but they will be windows problems. i don't see how you could hurt anything by trying to install the drive as is. give it a shot but keep it in mind that you might have to do a clean install. a clean install is always recommended but you might get lucky

 

[Arrow]

As ledzepp98 said, it's always better to clean install, as there may be traces of your old component drivers and other things left on the hard drive. You'd probably have to do a lot of Windows figuration to get everything working.

Rob
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[girish]

its better to do a clean install on a newer motherboard.
but it maybe better to take a chance at it.
you could simply plug your hard drive on your new motherboard. it would reboot a few times (anything from 4 to 15 times depending on the cards and peripherals you have) and windows will probably be ok. you might need a inf update for your newer motherboard. these files come on your motherboard cd.

stil you will have some problems with windows, and strange problems, those. you might get a unstable system, or it might crash or hand occasionally. as i got it once, you might loose your clipboard (somehow you cannot copy/paste or drag/drop in this case you need to format/install)
a tip for above problem: i modified the target of a: (see its properties) in windows\sendto dir to d:\back and then sent the important files on c drive to d:\back. you cannot do it any other way!!

best of luck, its better to give it a shot.

girish

 

[Guest]

I would recommend disabling all power management on your existing machine (esp. ACPI), using the BIOS, let windows detect that you've turned it all off, disable power management in the new PC, move the drive, then turn it all on, let Windows boot, restart and re-activate power management on the new PC's BIOS (if you use it).

I would also recommend de-installing your graphic card's drivers and installing the generic VGA driver instead, plus set resolution to 640x480, until you get windows up and running on the new machine.

These are really precautionary, but I've had problems with exotic video cards, and have heard bad reports of problems with power management. They just *might* happen, once in a blue moon, but it's worth taking preventitive measures IMHO.

Make sure you have all the drivers on floppies and/or CDs for the new PC before you start.

Ask yourself if you really need to build a whole new PC - surely just swapping the motherboard and processor is all you need to do? If you buy a new PC, then you might want to put your old hard drive in as the secondary IDE device, using the preconfigured WinME on the new PC as the actual version you want to use. You'd have to re-install all your software though.

 

[Bubba]

I would format the drive. It will cause you less problems in the long run. I'm not sure what chipset your current board uses but the TBird mobo will use the VIA chipset.

 

[jlbigguy]

It sounds like the best thing to do is start fresh. I have backed up my important data on a second hard disk, so rebuilding won't be so bad.

My original plan was to simply keep the drive, and boot it in the new PC. However, switching from an Intel to an AMD motherboard gave me second thoughts. Will Windows find and load the proper drivers? Will it disable what is no longer needed? Not wanting any wildcards, I will rebuild the drive on the AMD system so that I can eliminate Windows as causing any instabilities that may occur. It would be interesting to experiment, but I need the PC working quickly and properly.

To complicate things further, the Celeron Box will be used to replace an OLD Pentium 200. The drive from the Pentium 200 will be going into the Celeron Box. Even though it is Intel -> Intel, I now think it wise to rebuild this drive as well. Again, I will backup data to a second hard disk, which will make restoration easier.

Thank you for your suggestion!

 

[Grizely1]

Yeah do what Ledzepp said, but before you do backup your current HD, don't wanna put that thing in the TBird PC and find it's all screwed and llose all your stuff.

 

[jeffg007]

What I would do is make a partition then use ghost to make an image of the drive. Ghost is awsome! This way you will have your drive backed up and you can restore the drive in 10 mins.

Jeff

 

[Nikko]

You shouldn't have any problems as long as you have your driver disks handy when you boot up for the first time off the new system. The only thing I would suggest is copying the Windows .CAB files from the CD to a folder on the hard drive prior to changing out the old hardware. Windows probably won't recognize your IDE controller when you intially boot with the new hardware, thus it won't see the ATAPI CD-ROM. If you put the .CAB files on the hard drive before hand you won't have a problem.

 

[Guest]

Nothing bad at all will happen, go ahead change the HDD to the new comp.

This is based on first you are using WinME, which have VIA_4in1 drivers for whatever mobo you have because your athlon must be using that chipset.

The things you need to be aware of are

The Intel BX chipset files will reside in your PC, not deleted. No big deal, but the registry will contain extra bit of those information that you will never use again, which takes up a little bit of the System.DAT and user.DAT file size, again no big deal, but it also means when your computer boot it will run through those registry wasting a second or two for nothing.

When you changed over, remember to install VIA_4in1_version_4.25a or whatever the latest is now.

Ultimately I will format and reinstall Me, I would first use something like Partition magic to store all my data in the second partition and can safely format the windows partition anytime.

You can also copy the installer into the second or third partition so that you can install from your HDD without needing to rely on the CD-rom

My Duron 900, 128MB 7.5ns CL2, Asus A7V, 15GB 7200rpm ATA100, only took 19mins to install ME.

For your case I know it wouldn't be faster by alot because the HDD is the worst bottleneck. Still if it finishes in 15min, its damp fast.

Best regards
cx5