Windows 7: Upgrading motherboard on Windows 7

I am going to be upgrading my motherboard, along with the processor and memory, with an existing Windows 7 installation. I always expect things to go horribly wrong, of course, so I have backed up as needed. Still, I would really rather do a successful upgrade of the OS rather than a clean install.

I know with XP you can just do a repair install before letting the OS boot with the new hardware, but I have never upgraded this way with Vista, and I expect 7 is similar to Vista. I saw that it may help my chances to delete the current IDE controllers before the change ( MSFN Forums > New Motherboard upgrade with Vista ). Does that mean I just delete the relevant drivers in Device Manager? I'm not clear about exactly which drivers this entails in Device Manager. And the following link is for XP, but I'm wondering how relevant it would be on Vista or Windows 7: How to replace the motherboard on a computer that is running Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, or Windows 2000



The new motherboard should be fairly similar otherwise, it would be updating from an AMD SB600 south bridge to an SB700, but it's staying with an AMD brand chip etc.

Any ideas or tips would be greatly appreciated!

Highly NOT recommended!

Your asking for long term problems in the future going down that route. A clean install is always the best option after installing new hardware, especially when replacing the motherboard.

You will save yourself a lot of time and grief in the long run by doing a fresh install of Windows 7, for all the time it takes anyway.

I agree, I normally would not do an upgrade install. But the hardware change is sort of unexpected, as I need to drop the hardware into another machine that died. And I expect there would be longer-term problems, but as this is a beta, I don't expect it to be too long-term anyhow, so I'd rather experiment with stuff like this at this point rather than in the future when I am actually expecting it to be a solid, final install.

So, I know that a clean install is best, and I may have to do it anyway, but I want to see what I can get away with first. I would think people have tried this already?

Oh, and I found the answer to one of my previous questions in the original post here: http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news...ng-windows.ars

That describes in more detail how to change the PCI IDE controller driver to a standard driver, for anybody who is following the thread.

Well since not many have yet to do a Repair install of Windows 7 i would use this opportunity to experiment to see how it works but expect to do a clean install in the long run...
That way you get the best of both worlds.

I have performed it twice now with no issues & I didn't even uninstall drivers.

As long as your data's backed up, give it a whirl Worse case scenario, you have do the full re-install.

This will NOT work.

Windows 7's "upgrade" will not run if you try to run it from the DVD. You will not be able to boot the machine once you swap the boards if the HAL is not an EXACT match - it will blue screen immediately on start.

The so-called "automatic repair" doesn't work to fix this either.

Been there, done that, no solution. This is a MAJOR problem - with XP you could boot the install CD and do an upgrade install, and it would work. That option is NOT available with Windows 7.

back up your stuff and do a fresh install.

I just changed from a Biostar motherboard to one made by Gigabyte, both AMD, but with different CPUs and memory. My initial Win 7 install after the change was clean on a new HDD, it worked great, Win 7 included all the necessary drivers, I didn’t even need to use the motherboard install disk.

But then, I plugged the original HDD with Win 7 and XP in a dual-boot configuration. Much to my surprise, the next boot-up was with the boot manager screen asking me to select which operating system I wanted to use.

Win 7 and XP both seemed compatible with the new motherboard. What I discovered in the bios was that the the old HDD had been selected as the HDD to boot from. That was easy enough to change, and now I boot from the new HDD and can access the info on the old HDD with no problem.

Same chipsets.