New Hardware - Trying to Boot into old XP

AirZoom

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So I'm helping my dad build a new rig. Replacing his older Thunderbird CPU with a new Asus P5Q motherboard, 3GHz C2D, 2GB Ram, Sapphire 4850. So the new hardware is together, and Windows XP won't boot because of the hardware change. BSOD. I'm wondering wil a XP repair install allow the system to get the new drivers it needs to boot up and have him not lose all his things like Bookmarks, Pictures etc.

Thanks Beyond.
 
I did this recently to two machines. One of them booted with the old disk, the other one would BSOD with it's old disk and needed a repair install. Make sure you are using the repair install and not the recovery console. You basically go through as if you were going to do a fresh install, but when you get to it the install will detect the old windows install and give you the option to repair. You will keep your old settings and files.

If you are installing a SATA drive and don't want to use IDE emulation, then make sure you have the SATA drivers on a floppy. Alternatively you boot off the old drive with the new one in place, install the drivers for the now detected SATA drive, and then clone the old drive to the new one.
 
Make sure you are using the repair install and not the recovery console. You basically go through as if you were going to do a fresh install, but when you get to it the install will detect the old windows install and give you the option to repair. You will keep your old settings and files.

IOW: hit "r" the 2nd time it is an option during setup, rather than the 1st :p
 
replacing mboards without a fresh install of xp is a bad thing yes it works a lot of the time
but a fresh install is better
 
Indeed, a fresh install is really the only way to go. You'll just give yourself a big headache if you try to patch things, and even then it might not work well.

Backup his files, do a fresh install, and he'll have a sweet gaming rig ready to go.
 
A fresh install is better if you've not got much else installed, but if you've got a lot of stuff installed and don't want to spend a couple of days reinstalling and moving data over, cloning a disk works pretty well. 30-60 minutes to clone a disk (if you're upgrding to a new drive), 30 mins to do a repair install (if necessary), and a few mins to install new drivers is a lot more covenient. I've done it quite a few times, and had very few problems and they were easily resolved.

In fact, I think I once went through about 6 years of upgrades (Win98/SE/ME/XP) on the same boot image without a fresh reinstall, and everything worked well.
 
little tip
if your backing up certain user folders its best to copy them to a drive that isnt ntfs (dvd,cd,flash drive) otherwise the files can sometimes still retain the original permissions and even though you reinstall with the same user name sometimes xp will say you dont have permission to access the files
 
But you should be able to easily change the permissions if needed, your admin anyway. If you dont have anything not ntfs laying around I wouldnt take the extra effort.
 
depends in xp home its not as easy
and im sur ehe'd have a blank cd lying round
or if not put the files in a zip file that will strip the permissions from them
 
I believe there's still the cacls command in XP home. so you can do permission stuff on the command line. but I may be wrong or you may have to get cacls.exe .

the two XP home limitations that annoyed the hell out of me : no Group Policy Editor (it's a convenient place to disable AutoPlay so you don't automatically run viruses on USB drive. Else you need tweakUI), no tasklist/taskkill commands (you can use tasklist then taskkill /F rogue processes like you do on linux with ps and kill -9. can be used if some old game corrupts your display and you manage to get a fullscreen prompt with win+r, cmd, enter, alt+enter)
 
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