Changing Mobo without reinstalling Win 8.1?

[tayto_0]

Guys i'm looking to swap out my x79 MSI board for an x79 ASUS board, i'm not too concerned about having to reactivate windows i'm just looking to keep my current installation and installed programs.

Can i just uninstall all drivers related to the current mobo and pop in the other? Doesn't sound like a good idea so i thought i'd ask

 

[Vimes]

I recently did the same with my Sons PC. I changed the motherboard (faulty) for another with the same chipset (Abit to Gigabyte) and used the same install of Windows 8.1. It worked a treat without any issues.
It was an older chipset that yours (P35) but that would make no difference.

 

[lucifer-mnm]

I wouldn't recommend going that route but if you must swap board and not reinstall Windows there are a couple of things you can do to try and ensure that no issues occur after swapping board.

My successes doing this have usually been swapping one board to another that have similar chipsets so moving intel to intel, via to via, nvidia to nvidia. Moving to different chipsets has generally been a pain and not worked well if at all.

Remove all drivers you can from add/remove programs, perhaps even uninstall devices from device manager where possible - then swap the board and hope it boots to re-detect hardware.

Had a few issues with this procedure causing issues with install antivirus so may be worth uninstalling that before board swap.

Before trying this please make sure you have data backed up.

If you do try it I wish you luck.

 

[jay20aiii]

If you want to remove the old drivers, I would do so after installing the new board.

But yes, basically everything should continue to run perfectly fine after switching, and once all your drivers have been installed for the new mobo (most of which will probably be picked up by Windows). As a rule of thumb I would download the most recent drivers from the manufacturer website for your new board.

If you have a second hard drive or partition available, you could always make a windows backup image for the just in case scenario. But for the this kind of task, I personally would not bother (that isn't to say that you shouldn't though!).

 

[lucifer-mnm]

If you want to remove the old drivers, I would do so after installing the new board.

Remove drivers before the board swap - if the old drivers are left installed (hard disk controllers seem to generally be the cause of issues here) there's an increased chance that you end up with blue screens on boot after the board swap (OS booting with old disk controller drivers on new board with different controller.)

Having said that it should be less of an issue if the chipset isn't changing. I would still remove the old drivers first though to minimise issues.

 

[jay20aiii]

Fair point, I am referencing all the times I have switched a hard drive into a new PC and upgraded mobo's in the past (probably a handful of times) without removing drivers. I never had any issues. Albeit that is not to say that they can't and won't occur.

So perhaps you should go with what Lucifer suggests on this one!

 

[lucifer-mnm]

My guess is that as we are talking swapping boards that have the same chipset it should just work.

However for the sake of a few minutes removing drivers etc to begin with you may avoid swapping boards, having issues (no boot, boot to bsod) and end up having to fit the old board, remove drivers and switch board again.

I will keep my fingers crossed whichever way you decide to go. GL

 

[tayto_0]

Cheers guys, thanks for the advice. I'll let ya know how i get on.

 

[theheyes]

I do this all the time without taking any preparatory steps (backup aside which should go without saying) and rarely have any issues and that includes between CPU/chipset vendors.

It's nowhere near the hassle it used to be but there is still a lot of leftover anxiety about it.