Should you reformat your HDD if you are going from a slota to socketA?

[DUCK]

I will get to build me a new socket setup in 2 months,
I was just wondering if you needed to this.
reinstall via's
or would it just be better to cleanly load from scratch?

[Big Daddy]

Hey Dude,

I can tell you from first hand experience that if you want to keep the old HDD info and OS it can be a bear!

By far the easiest thing to do is a newly formatted HDD.

That said, depending on the sate of your drivers and such it can be fairly easy as well.

I recently did this exact same thing for a couple of upgrades and in one case it was a bear, the other was a breeze. In all I've done it maybe 10 times and *overall* it was relatively easy, but there are those times...

[wolven]

What I'd suggest, is right before you swap, go into registry, and delete all device entries.. that way, when you shutdown / swap / turn back on, it detects all your HW as if they had never been there before, thus getting a clean(er) install of drivers

wolven

OMG.. wolven spoke!! He's not dead!!:P

[Geef]

If you change motherboards with your upgrade one way to not reformat is go into the registry and goto:
hkeylocalmachine... ack I'm at work using a NT machine so the registry is different.
Anyway once you get to where your going you need to delete the entire ENUM folder and then shut the system down and do the upgrade.
Doing this will make your computer redetect EVERY piece of hardware again.

Once I get home I'll give the exact location in the registry.

[dieu]

I agree! Play it save and install a fresh OS with your new rig...

[Zwolf]

Believe me your better off just saving your important files and formating. You can do the registry hack, but your just not gonna get it all. You'll most likely do it in the end anyway. Remember Formating is your friend!

[Ramg66]

I vote repartition and format, just like they say about Video cards if you want the best performance delete ALL the old drivers and install the new ones.

[OldFrog]

Duck, I installed Win981ed on my K7M in June 2000, only upgraded drivers sometimes.
I swapped my HD in my new A7V in Dec 2000.
I had not that much troubles, but lastly upgraded to WinMe as a try, for USB devices and PS/2 mouse weren't recoginsed anymore.

I did that as there are really tons of stuff in my HD and I didn't want to reinstall it (13G out of 45G on my Maxtor HD). I must say curiously , except some lockups which stopped when I upgraded to IE5.5SP1, everything has been OK for the last 2 weeks.

To have some luck to upgrade, before your swap your HD, boot in safe mode and go in Control Panel/System and delete <u>all entries</u>.

Then put your HD in the new rig and let it detect everything.

[gatemaster]

you might as well just fdisk and format and be done with it saves time in the long run. if you don't and you have any issues you'll waste a lot of time trying to figure out what is causing it and wondering if your're having problems because you didn't clean it right from the start(just my opinion)

[detected2]

Duck,
I am going to go against the grain here a little bit!

I am sure you have alot of files you want to save! The only thing that is going to screw things up a little is drivers and settings. But certainly not drivers such Nvidia drivers...they are the same.
This is what i have done time and time again with NO problems what so ever and it makes sense!.
Before swapping out MB simply go into Device Manager and delete ALL your hardware (except mouse) including everything in "System devices"!!!!
That's it!
On Reboot with new MB simply reinstall drivers as they are asked for....the new motherboard resources will be primary!
If it doesn't work......I'll owe you a Big Fat Steak Dinner!