Windows XP – Replacing your Motherboard Without Reinstalling

Replacing your motherboard isn’t always as simple as it sounds. You may be lucky; the new motherboard may work with driver you already have installed. If you’re unlucky you’ll know about it.

You may find that with the new motherboard your computer reboots or BSOD. If you computer reboots you can press F8 before it boots and choose not to reboot on failure then you will see the BSOD with STOP 0x0000007B, which means it cannot find the boot device. This is because the drivers for the new harddrive controller on your motherboard are not installed.

There are several ways in which you can move from one motherboard to the next:

The complete reinstall: The most drastic course – unless you copy them off first you will lose everything on the boot partition which probably includes all of your documents, desktop, user settings etc. You don’t want to do this if possible. You will also have to reinstall all of your programs.

The upgrade install from windows: If your old motherboard is functional, boot up, pop your windows CD in, run the setup on the CD and choose to upgrade. It will copy some files over then reboot. Turn it off at this point and swap motherboards. When it boots up it will reinstall windows XP. You get to keep all your old settings + files and you don’t need to reinstall your programs. On the down side it means you lose all your windows updates - watch out for internet viruses which will attack you immediately as you’re not patched. I found with this method that I couldn’t get windows update to work until I installed SP3 and IE8 which I downloaded using another PC.

The upgrade install from boot CD: If your original motherboard is broken this is the next best thing to the previous option. This method only works on some variants of windows CD. Boot from your Windows XP CD and when you go to install pick the drive as if you are going to install over the top without formatting and you may get presented with the option to upgrade. Don’t pick anything else that offers to format, destroy or install in another directory. Once this starts upgrading it is pretty similar to the above method. If the upgrade option isn't there then you're unlucky. Don't pick anything else unless you're sure you want to lose your previous installation.

There is another way which doesn’t involve upgrading or reinstalling windows as long as you have access to the original working motherboard. It helps to understand why moving from one motherboard to another is a problem in the first place. After the initial install Windows cuts down the number of storage drivers it loads early in the boot to just the storage chipsets it has been in contact with. To start off with this will just be the driver that is used in your original motherboard. This makes booting a lot faster than loading all drivers it knows about just in case you’ve changed your hardware.

To get round this issue we need to expose windows to another storage chipset and install its driver. Windows will then be able to boot off this new storage chipset. The only issue is that the new chipset you want it to be exposed to is embedded into the new motherboard. We need a third chipset that we can move between the two motherboards.

This third chipset comes, depending on the type of harddrive you have, in the form a SATA or ATA PCI card which is able to boot. Plug this card into your old motherboard but don’t plug your harddrive into it yet. Boot and Windows will see the new card and install or ask for drivers. Once Windows is happy and has the drivers it needs you should be able to shut down your computer plug your disk into the card and boot from it. At this point Window will be able to boot from your disk attached to the motherboard or to the PCI card. You can now move this card to the new motherboard and boot off your drive attached to the PCI card. This will now see the new hardware on the motherboard and ask for all the divers.

It is a good idea to have all of these drivers extracted and ready on the drive before you boot on the new motherboard. If you are using a USB mouse and keyboard you may have initial difficulties as windows tends to throw up dialogs asking for drivers for hardware it doesn't have drivers for, before it tries adding the drivers for your USB controller, mouse and keyboard which it most probably does have drivers for. If you get into this situation you may have to skip over a few the first time through, then manually point windows at them later. If you have no mouse or keyboard working you may need to wait till it boots and settles, then tap the power button to get it to shut down and try booting again. If this doesn’t fix it you may need to borrow a ps2 keyboard and or mouse from a friend or work, but then nothing is that simple. If your computer has never seen a ps2 keyboard or mouse it may not install the drivers for them till you log in, which you can’t do till it’s got the drivers for at least the keyboard. In this situation you’ll need to boot on the old motherboard login and expose it to the ps2 keyboard/mouse then come back to the new motherboard again. Yes, I have experienced this myself.

Once you’re in, right click on my computer, properties, hardware, and then device manager. Add drivers for all the unknown items. If you say no to looking for the drivers using windows update and press next it should give you a clue as to which driver you are looking for, e.g. audio or storage controller. Once this is all set up you should be able to connect your harddrive to the motherboard and take out the PCI card and you’re done.

If you don't have a SATA or ATA PCI controller card you could probably get one off eBay and sell it again afterwards. Make sure from the seller that it is possible to boot off the card, the cheapest ones don't tend to let you boot.

A final note – always make sure you have anything you value backed up in case you make a mistake.