OT, New MB & processor, keep existing Win7 install?

Time for a totally new MB and processor upgrade.
What are the odds that I can install new MB drivers on the existing Win7
and not have to do a clean install of Win7?

On 2/3/2017 11:05 PM, Paul in Houston TX wrote:
Time for a totally new MB and processor upgrade.
What are the odds that I can install new MB drivers on the existing Win7
and not have to do a clean install of Win7?
If the old motherboard still works:
Image the drive...justincase...I use macrium reflect free.
Sysprep the drive.
Image the sysprepped drive.
Restore the sysprep image to the new system.
Activate windows on the new system...and there's the rub,
depending on your license terms and how different the mobo devices.
Worked for me.

Some cloning programs can fixup the drivers, like sysprep,
but I haven't found a free one.

On Sat, 04 Feb 2017 00:29:15 -0800, mike wrote:

On 2/3/2017 11:05 PM, Paul in Houston TX wrote:
Time for a totally new MB and processor upgrade.
What are the odds that I can install new MB drivers on the existing Win7
and not have to do a clean install of Win7?

Depends on whether it is an OEM licence. An OEM licence will expect
to find identical or at least very similar hardware, and will fail to
authenticate on a machine with sufficiently different hardware.

If the old motherboard still works:

In a command prompt as Administrator:

slmgr /dlv
slmgr upk key from above output

Image the drive...justincase...I use macrium reflect free.

Then copy onto the hd drivers for the new hardware.

Preferably also ensure that they can be found on the PnP search path.
This used to be in the registry key ...

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Device
Path

.... but on my current W7 laptop that has only ...

%SystemRoot%\inf

.... whereas on older versions of Windows it would contain a history of
wherever you'd pointed the browser dialogue that came up whenever new
hardware was encountered.

Sysprep the drive.

Some tips for using SysPrep are in the section numbered 10 near the
bottom of this page on my site (the page was written for Windows 2000,
and still applied to XP, but Vista+ is different in some respects):
http://www.macfh.co.uk/JavaJive/Wind...eBuilding.html

Particularly, do not allow the imaged system to boot from its hard
disk between running Sysprep and imaging, otherwise you'll have to run
it again. Although I haven't tried it, I suspect imaging using
Macrium running from within the Sysprep-ed image would not be a good
idea - my advice would be to use an entirely seperate imaging boot
environment at this stage, such as a rescue CD or USB stick.

Image the sysprepped drive.
Restore the sysprep image to the new system.

On first boot, SysPrep will hopefull cause the entire PnP hardware
tree to be redetected. Depending on how successfully you manipulated
the device path, you may or may not have to point the driver
installation routines manually to wherever you copied the driver
files.

After all the new devices have successfully been installed, check for
'Ghost' devices from the legacy hardwa
http://www.macfh.co.uk/JavaJive/Wind...stDevices.html

Activate windows on the new system...and there's the rub,

slmgr ipk key

.... should do it if it's going to work.

depending on your license terms and how different the mobo devices.

As already indicated, unlikely to work with OEM licence.

Worked for me.

Some cloning programs can fixup the drivers, like sysprep,
but I haven't found a free one.

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Please always reply to ng as the email in this post's
header does not exist. Or use a contact address at:
http://www.macfh.co.uk/JavaJive/JavaJive.html
http://www.macfh.co.uk/Macfarlane/Macfarlane.html

"Paul in Houston TX" wrote

| What are the odds that I can install new MB drivers on the existing Win7
| and not have to do a clean install of Win7?

In addition to the posible license issue....
You should be fine assuming the board comes
with Win7 drivers. Defaults will probably be fine
until you get the drivers installed.

I wouldn't do it without first making disk images.
You might consider that.

On XP I find it's necessary to remove the IDE
drivers, or face a bluescreen. I don't know for sure
whether Win7 needs that, but I'd do it to be on
the safe side. Whatever drivers you uninstall,
do it and then shut down and install the new
motherboard without rebooting.
Otherwise, when you reboot Windows will helpfully
say, "New hardware.... Not to worry, we found the
drivers!"
With no approriate drivers Windows will
temporarily use generics, until you install them
from the MB disk.

Presumably both CPUs are multi-core. If the old
board has single core you'll need to swap out hal.dll
for the new board to see the cores. That's a whole
other kettle of fish, but doable.

The only other problem I've seen on XP (again,
Win7 is probably smoother) would be custom
drivers. For instance, if you went from a PS2
to USB mouse, or from USB to wireless, you might
need to keyboard your way to getting those
drivers installed.

You could end up needing adjustment in the BIOS.
Probably not, but if you get any weird behavior
keep that in mind.

Power supply? With the new board you'll have
new RAM and CPU. Probably new audio/graphics/
networking. Then you'll have existing drives. But
if the power supply is old, or limited, you might
want to consider replacing that.

If you do those steps then you shouldn't need
any extra specialty software. I've never tried
Sysprep and don't see the point, but if you don't
mind the extra hassle you could always try that.

But the license issue is not
a small one. Only a full retail license (typically
about $100 more than a retail OEM license)
is officially allowed to be put onto a new machine.
If you have an OEM disk or a brand name computer
then you'll probably be faced with either no way
to activate or the unappealing challenge of hoping
you can scam/sweet talk the MS employees you'll
have to talk to in order to request activation.

One other thought: You apparently haven't been
doing disk imaging. If it were me, rather than transfer
the old setup, I'd spend a day installing fresh, installing
all software, get whatever updates you want, get it
all set up, then make two disk images: One before
you install MB drivers and one after all of that plus
activation is done. Then back up those images to
several places. A lot of work, but
then you'll be set for as long as you use Win7. The
first image can be used on any machine while the
second image will be a ready-to-go OS for your
current machine with the new board.

Paul in Houston TX wrote:
Time for a totally new MB and processor upgrade.
What are the odds that I can install new MB drivers on the existing Win7
and not have to do a clean install of Win7?

My apologies for the lack of info. More info:
The old board was LGA1366. CPU burned out due to over clocking.
The new board will be a z270 with 6700k Sky Lake, new GTX-1070 vid card,
& new 16 gb DDR4 ram. Optane when they come out. Kaby Lake would be
nice but it is not supported on W7 or older. Everything will be o/c'd.
Will use existing gold cert 750w p/s. The new equipment will use less
power than the old.
I cannot get the data off of the old hdd's since my other machines are
either w7 laptops or IDE with no sata connectors, however, I have a
month old clone of the main hdd. My ide to sata converters do not work
due to the XP 32 gb limit.
If I have to, I will install a new W7 on the clone and copy as much as I
can from the old main hdd to the new w7 install.
License is not a concern.

Paul in Houston TX wrote:

My ide to sata converters do not work due to the XP 32 gb limit.

There was a 2GB and 33GB limit when using the "Clip" jumper
on IDE drives. This solves the problem of using large drives,
on really old OSes (*not* WinXP). Even my first PC from 1999 or
so, it eventually got a BIOS for which the limit was 137GB.
SATA devices come way after this.

The 32GB limit is on FAT32 formatting command. An artificial Windows
limit, not a real limitation. Using the RidgeCrop formatter, you
can make a 2.2TB partition if you want.

IDE by itself, can be 28bit LBA, limited to 137GB.

At a certain point, the proposal to double-pump the
IDE registers (write to them twice), supported the
newer 48bit LBA register format. (The drive must know about
and support any pumping, the controller, in theory, is
transparent.) This allows much larger drives to be used.
So now we're 137GB when using 48bit LBA.

If you have a device with is compliant with SATA, the
ATA spec covering SATA, would also include 48bit LBA
on IDE. So it would be pretty silly to make a device
for which the IDE side was =137GB and the SATA side was
"unlimited".

On a system with MSDOS partitioning, the 32 bit storage
space for LBAs limits disks to 2.2TB for booting and the
like. So that limits what a 48bit LBA could buy you. However,
equipment with 48-bit LBA have the option of using GPT
partitioning. So they should support even larger drives.

I do have a crippled bit of kit here, a Firewire enclosure
with 28bit LBA, but it's rather old. And attempts to flash it
up, didn't work, as the silicon is just wrong for the job. So
that's really the only hardware I own, where trying 137GB is a problem.

Win2K SP2 would be a problem. WinXP Gold or SP1 may have
a problem (EnableLargeLBA???). But that represents the danger
of an OS overwriting low LBAs, when an address rolls over in
software. That could happen, even if you have 48bit LBA hardware,
and use a crippled OS for your technician machine. I worked for
a year or two (on purpose), on a Win2K SP2 setup, with that
exposure ever present. I had some software, where it was
claimed it didn't work right on Win2K SP4.

*******

This is the 48bit LBA proposal for IDE. It's about as close
as you might get, to some details from that era.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041024...l/e00101r6.pdf

*******

While I can test some "Big stuff" on IDE, at this point,
I don't know if the test result would be relevant to your needs.

Paul

Paul wrote:

Paul in Houston TX wrote:

My ide to sata converters do not work due to the XP 32 gb limit.


Paul

Thanks Paul. Much appreciated.
The hardware groups are nearly dead except for the spam.

And more apologies... I see that I made another mistake:
Meant to say 137gb, not 32gb.

My real question is:
"What are the odds that I can install new MB drivers on the existing
Win7 and not have to do a clean install of Win7?"

It is important but not earth shaking if it does not work since I have a
spare 500g 3gbs hdd. Just did not want to spend days/weeks installing
all the upgrades, software, and hacks again.

Paul in Houston TX wrote:
Paul wrote:

Paul in Houston TX wrote:

My ide to sata converters do not work due to the XP 32 gb limit.


Paul

Thanks Paul. Much appreciated.
The hardware groups are nearly dead except for the spam.

And more apologies... I see that I made another mistake:
Meant to say 137gb, not 32gb.

My real question is:
"What are the odds that I can install new MB drivers on the existing
Win7 and not have to do a clean install of Win7?"

It is important but not earth shaking if it does not work since I have a
spare 500g 3gbs hdd. Just did not want to spend days/weeks installing
all the upgrades, software, and hacks again.


The issue as I see it, is activation.

Before you shut down the old OS, you can "re-arm" the Registry
for in-box driver detection. Or, if you know the old box was AHCI
on an Intel chipset, chances are the boot volume will be accessible
on your next Intel chipset. In your specific situation, it might
just work without help.

However, once it does the activation check, it's not going to be happy.

Make sure you have two copies of the drive, so if it doesn't go well,
the state of the original content is preserved.

Since your old OS is dead, I don't see an easy way to prepare it
for activation. And I don't really have any experience with removing
license keys, moving hardware, and applying key again.

An OEM OS is supposed to be tied to the original motherboard.
However, if the license key doesn't have a lot of installs
against it (it's been a year or more since your last reinstall
on the old hardware), you may be able to convince them to activate
it on a new motherboard. Giving the reason as hardware failure.
As in your case, it actually *is* hardware failure.

Paul

Paul in Houston TX wrote:
Paul wrote:

Paul in Houston TX wrote:

My ide to sata converters do not work due to the XP 32 gb limit.


Paul

Thanks Paul. Much appreciated.
The hardware groups are nearly dead except for the spam.

And more apologies... I see that I made another mistake:
Meant to say 137gb, not 32gb.

My real question is:
"What are the odds that I can install new MB drivers on the existing
Win7 and not have to do a clean install of Win7?"

It is important but not earth shaking if it does not work since I have a
spare 500g 3gbs hdd. Just did not want to spend days/weeks installing
all the upgrades, software, and hacks again.


This covers the topic pretty well. Pointing out, that
at least in theory, they will accept hardware failure as
a reason to be putting a new motherboard *underneath* an
existing System Builder OEM install. It's just the mechanics
I worry about, because I've had systems "freeze" here when
there is an activation issue. Other times, I get the "72 hour warning",
which is a much more useful response on first boot.

http://www.howtogeek.com/261053/when...e-to-a-new-pc/

Paul

Paul in Houston TX wrote:
Time for a totally new MB and processor upgrade.
What are the odds that I can install new MB drivers on the existing Win7
and not have to do a clean install of Win7?

Thanks everyone.
As I suspected, the hardware answer seems to be, "try it and see".
I'll let everyone know how it went.
Need to get the parts first... about $1,200 worth.

Paul in Houston TX wrote:
Paul in Houston TX wrote:
Time for a totally new MB and processor upgrade.
What are the odds that I can install new MB drivers on the existing Win7
and not have to do a clean install of Win7?

Thanks everyone.
As I suspected, the hardware answer seems to be, "try it and see".
I'll let everyone know how it went.
Need to get the parts first... about $1,200 worth.


When I did this, I said it would "absolutely be the
last desktop" :-) That's if you need a justification.
My strategy to date has been pretty uneconomic. I won't
earn any prizes for planning.

Paul