Upgrade motherboard from hoary old one to newer?

I have Win 7 & XP multibooting flawlessly on an old Gigabyte 8VM800M-775 mobo, 2GHz max speed with a Pentium 4 Prescott core CPU). Although I almost exclusively use Win7, with the coming XP end of life, I'm thinking of upgrading my mobo. I've read it's possible to do that without format/reinstall, retaining settings and apps, if one forces the HD drivers back to the generic first (they're the Via 4-in-1s now) by uninstalling that, and Windows'll use the default generics, see all the changed stuff, reconfigure itself, and require re-authentication. I really don't want to have to do a total reinstall/re-tweak of a new system! My downtime'll be murder!

There are dual installations of both OSs (I know, drive letters are intra-OS only), on an Intel 80Gb SSD (SATAØ – C: D: E: [XP] F:[7]), and backups on a Maxtor (SATA1 – N: O: P: [XP] Q: [7]). The system starts & multiboots off an old Maxtor IDE (H:, I: [minimal and has only \Boot and boot sector, etc., BIOS set to start from there) that does nothing else (used to start 98SE, but won't work any more). Just presents the boot menu, and relinquishes. Since this drive is the boot drive (has the boot sector), and newer MOBOs don't support the old IDE, but SATA only, I guess I'd have to flag the SSD or other SATA drive's primary partition as boot, and its root would have a copy of the \BOOT folder that contains 7's system-startup data. I might have to monkey with BCDEDIT to point the BCD startup to the OS configurations from this new origin, right?

No newer mobos have IDE, of course. Not only that: They also can start from UEFI or standard BIOS. If I'm going to do all this work (I'd like to get it done in a day ), I want to make sure I do it in the most efficient and best way. Although $$$ isn't an issue, I don't want to do hardware overkill. I don't need a speed-demon gaming machine, for example.

Suggestions? Experienced doing something like this? Thanks!

There's an app called Easy BCD that can be used to copy boot files to other partitions. I think it's free and I think there are some tutorials on its use on this website.

Beyond that I can't help other than to say I've heard that Win 7 is pretty forgiving of new hardware. Nor am I sure how cloning or imaging applications are likely to work in such a complicated situation. My guess would be that you will be plowing new ground and that no one around here has been through your exact situation. You'll get a lot of "it might work" or "it should work" comments, but you'd likely have to just dive in and decide at what point you would throw in the towel and do clean installs.

Sure, I know it's complicated & old. I realized that I'll also have to go to 64 bit. Almost all new mobos are that, and installing 32-bit 7 on one is a waste.

It's a self-built system, so I have a legitimate installation DVD set. That's not a problem. I'll get killer hardware and plenty of RAM to allow me to install the emulator and run 32-bit XP from there. For now, though, I guess I'll just stay with 32-bit 7 and my current system, as it's "good enough" for what I'm doing. At some point I'm sure I'll be forced to upgrade, but it's nice to have breathing room not to be forced to, right now.

I might just build an entirely new box with 64-bit 7 on it, then network it to the old box and move stuff over piecemeal, as work allows, and when the new system is up to the old one's functional level, I can retire it. Wonder if my license'd let me switch over like that, with a brief doubled installation?

Thanks for the input.