Windows 7 Installation - Transfer to a New Computer

Thanks Robert, I edited my post to include updated info that I had found the windows ISO download links.
I am attempting this again as soon as I log off here. Wish me luck!

It's not working. I just spent something like the last 4 hours (time between this post and my prior post) booting and rebooting the computer over and over again. I was actually able to sort of get into safe mode once. It froze up, I let it sit and that's what it did sit there. The little "safe mode" signs showed up in the corners and there was a black screen with my mouse cursor, but nothing else. It wasn't accessing the CD rom as there was no light to indicate it was running, though I am not sure if it was accessing the ssd as there are no spinning disc sounds. When I got into safe mode I clicked it without networking or anything else. I'm not sure if I was supposed to enable networking or not. Either way it looks as though I will have to re-install windows which works quite well with the new ISO I downloaded. I'm not looking forward to it. I have to put everything back into my old Dell case first then maybe I will play some games because it will be a good while before I can get everything loaded up again and re-installed. I have a lot of games and other programs on that computer (right now I am using my old Dell Inspiron 9200 laptop to post this). Some questions:
1. There is an option to load up drivers in the system diagnostics tools when I boot from the Win 7 disc, is it possible to load the drivers up manually for the motherboard?
2. If there is no other solution by later tomorrow I will start doing the re-install process. I use three different game servers; Origin, Steam, and Uplay. I know with Origin I can simply save the game install folders and when I go to re-install a game it will automatically detect the files in the location I point it to so I don't have to re-download the files. Is this the same way with Steam and Uplay? I think I have over 80 gigs of games between the three. Hey don't judge, the games are pretty inexpensive at times. I usually spend less than $10 on most games, less than $20 on a few and only one or two were over $30....
Thanks for the advice so far everyone, it's great advice but apparently this method will not work with my set up.
Bruce

Nevermind, forget I said all that above. It works! This is what I did two more boot tries after I made that post:
When I got into the boot menu for safe mode I selected the win 7 disc instead of the SSD the OS is on. It went into loading drivers then it gave the message that it was unable to complete loading the drivers and that I needed to restart windows to complete loading the drivers (or something like that). I re-started and expected it to give me another error. It went through the whole setup and now I am posting to you from that new MB!
I guess maybe somewhere it stated that one had to go into safe mode off the win 7 disc to get this to work and I missed it. Great idea Kari thanks for the help!

I'm having a few minor problems though:
1. I store all my music on my actual HDD (not enough room on the 120gb SSD). When I booted everything on the new MB it changed the drive letter of the HDD. Now none of my playlists will work because it is searching for the songs in the playlists on drive "E" when it is all on drive "D" now. How do I change the drive letter or is there a way to get it to locate the correct songs in windows media player?

2. After about 5 boot ups, my OS still takes almost a minute to load when on the other MB it booted up much faster in about 15 - 30 seconds. Now each time I re-started it I was adding new hardware. Should it be starting faster now or is there a setting I forgot about?

3. I had two new PCIe cards I wanted to install, a SATA 3 (Rosewill) board and a USB 3.0 (Tecknet) board. The SATA board didn't load up correctly but the USB 3.0 board works just fine. I at first had a "unknown device" in Device Manager, but windows found an update: ATK - system - ATK0110 ACPI UTILITY, after installing that update the "unknown device" disappeared, but there are no new SATA or RAID controllers, or any other kind of new storage device listed. Anyone know what gives?

Bruce


Bruce

Bruce congratulations I knew you would get there in the end. You will find that there's a few little things that you have to tweak but that's no problem. I'm not very technically minded these days but Kari seems to have done a good job.

Kari, I remember several years ago reading of changing the motherboard by first loading the new motherboard's chipset drivers into Windows. I think the magazine was Australian Personal Computing APC. What this guy said was not to run the normal setup routine that comes with the disc because like is not it will probably won't run, but to find the chipset drivers on the disc and load them this way. Then immediately shut down, just open change the motherboard and it should enumerate the new drivers. I must say I never tried this but you think this could be some of the problems that both myself and Bruce is encountered. In my case I went from an AMD motherboard to Intel. I'm just hoping that anybody else who reads this thread reads the whole of the thread and realise they need patience, perseverance and time.

Robert…

Madmaxneo said:

How do I change the drive letter or is there a way to get it to locate the correct songs in windows media player?

That's done from Windows Disk Management. Right click the drive you want to change and use the menu.

With this tool several headaches will go away in my life.

However, right now I have a mess in my house: the family computer's motherboard suddenly stopped working! (problems with the video card) and I didn't have time to do what is specified in your tutorial. Is there any way to perform this procedure after changing computer?

Thanks again.

I don't think it is possible to set it up after removing it from the original computer. You have to run sysprep and set it to generalize before removing the HDD or changing out the motherboard. Then again maybe there is a way to do it through a restore disc or something of the like. The others on here can probably clarify that better than I can.
On the other hand if you can't set it up and have to re-install windows then you can still save all the important files by connecting the drive to another computer and saving them on another HDD. Alternately you could purchase another MB of the same type, which would be less work for you but more time as you wait for the MB to arrive.

Bruce