Is it possible to upgrade a motherboard without reinstalling windows?

I have an upgrade edition of Windows 7 which was oringally used to upgrade my XP OS to Windows 7 OS. I want to upgrade my motherboard soon, but I fear ill have to format my PC in the progress which would make the upgrade disk void. Is it possible to upgrade a motherboard without having to reinstall windows again?

no because of the motherboard chipsets being different windows wont just magically adapt.

Granted, this was a few years back, my Vista hard drive was in an AMD CPU/Nvidia GPU system one minute, an Intel CPU/ATi GPU system the next - Windows detected the hardware, reauthenticated itself and I was away. At worst it may ask you to re-enter your Windows key.

It is usually best to remove any GPU, MoBo or CPU (e.g. AMD's Cool n' Quiet) software to be on the safe side, though.

no because of the motherboard chipsets being different windows wont just magically adapt.

seercirra

no because of the motherboard chipsets being different windows wont just magically adapt.

seercirra

Can I transfer my new harrdive with windows to my new motherboard and then do a clean format there? I believe you can format an upgrade version of windows 7 as long as you use its own format program..

Can I transfer my new harrdive with windows to my new motherboard and then do a clean format there? I believe you can format an upgrade version of windows 7 as long as you use its own format program..

JangoWuzHere

[QUOTE="JangoWuzHere"]

Can I transfer my new harrdive with windows to my new motherboard and then do a clean format there? I believe you can format an upgrade version of windows 7 as long as you use its own format program..

Toxic-Seahorse

1. Go to Device Manager
2. Expand the "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers"
3. If you have an entry like "Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller" or "Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller", you're all set. Just stop and upgrade your hardware, and you should be fine 99% of the time. If not, carry on to #4.
4. Right-click the non-standard disk controller entry and choose Properties -> Driver tab -> Update Driver. I'm talking controller entry here, not "ATA Channel o", "Primary IDE Channel", etc.
5. Choose the "Browse your computer/Let me pick" options until you get a list of compatible drivers. Select the default "Standard" driver:
- For a SATA drive: Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller
- For an IDE drive: Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller
6. Click OK, and don't reboot - shut down your computer and perform your hardware upgrade. If you reboot before your upgrade, Windows may automatically replace the standard driver with the custom one that you just tried to replace!

Just make sure you backup all your stuff (movies, music, pics, etc...) before you try it.

It doesn't always work. Most of the time it does. I did 3 PC's last week and it worked on 2 of them. The one it failed on was going from AMD to Intel. Luckily there was nothing to backup on it so I just reinstalled.

Should'nt be an issue, a clean install just "feels" better:P

I have an upgrade edition of Windows 7 which was oringally used to upgrade my XP OS to Windows 7 OS. I want to upgrade my motherboard soon, but I fear ill have to format my PC in the progress which would make the upgrade disk void. Is it possible to upgrade a motherboard without having to reinstall windows again?

JangoWuzHere

As long as you get past the possible HAL problems it's doable.

Usually you want to boot from the windows 7 disc and run the repair setup.

Thing is, I would never do this because you just purchased new hardware.

There is a chance that somehting in that hardware is damaged/broken has some incompatability with some obscure installed driver.

So now you're getting blue screens, or your PC freezes or underperforms.

What's the culprit? Your hardware, or the old OS? Well, get ready for hours of trouble shooting to figure it out.

Not worth the possible headaches, IMHO. You do a fresh install, and you can be a lot more confident that any issues you have are hardware based, or if driver based, aren't due to something left over from the old hardware.

If you are an experienced IT person or know how to trouble shoots installs well, I can see you takign that path, but then you wouldn't be asking this question.