If I install a new Mother Board & Processor to my existing setup will
I have to re-format my hard drive or will it boot & run as if nothing
has changed?
Thanks,
Ed West

Hi Ed,

From experience, I learned that replacing your motherboard without
wiping your hard drive and starting from scratch is a bad idea.  It
might *initially* run just fine...but the second you try to change
something...*POOF*.  Bye bye data.

Though you must, at the very least, run Windows Setup again, it's
usually recommended that you just start from scratch:

"If you make this upgrade, you will usually want to *at least*
reinstall Windows (just run setup again). It's probably best that you
actually format your hard drive and start from scratch after
installing the new motherboard, so you will want to back up your data,
etc."

How To Install A Motherboard
http://www.basichardware.com/howto_install_a_motherboard.html

"If a hard drive is moved to a new computer, the registry entries and
drivers for the mass storage controller hardware on the new
motherboard are not installed in Windows for the new computer and you
may not be able to start Windows. This is documented in Microsoft's*
knowledge base article †. This is true even if you move the hard drive
to a motherboard with the same chipset, as different hardware
revisions can cause this issue as well.

[...]

If you have moved or plan to move your hard drive to another
motherboard, Windows will need to be reinstalled."

Moving a Hard Drive to a New Motherboard
http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/iaa/harddrive.htm

Personally, I highly recommend wiping it out and starting from
scratch.  While you'll probably get loads of comments stating "I
didn't wipe my drive out and it runs just fine!", if something *does*
go wrong, you're going to have to wipe and start over anyway, wasting
many hours of time that I'm sure you'd rather spend doing something
less tedious.

Good luck with your upgrade! 

--Missy

Search terms:  [ "new motherboard" "hard drive" ]

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Request for Answer Clarification by thebookguy-ga on 01 Jul 2003 04:28 PDT

What is your experience that you mention?
Do you know anything about migration software where one transfers data
from one puter (or hd) to another?
Thanks for the answer. I will be accepting it.
Ed

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Clarification of Answer by missy-ga on 01 Jul 2003 07:55 PDT

Good morning, Ed!

Two years ago, my motherboard died a miserable and ignomious death -
she was only 6 months old.  Since she was still under warranty, I was
able to get a replacement.  The shop was out of the exact one I had to
replace, though, and gave me one of better quality.

I took my machine apart, got rid of the old board, installed the new
one, put everything back together, fired up the machine and...was
greeted by a cascade of error messages every time I tried to open a
program.  Looking at the System settings, I saw that it thought I
still had the old motherboard, so I ran Windows setup.

The computer ran sluggishly for a few days after that, then crashed
altogether.

It took a full wipe and reinstall to fix it, and I've since never done
a motherboard replacement for anyone without doing a virgin Windows
installation.

I am personally unfamiliar with the type of software you mention,
preferring to do regular backups of my data to a CD "just in case". 
You can get a good start and some solid advice here, though:

Tech TV:  Call For Help
Transfer Data Between Hard Drives
http://www.techtv.com/callforhelp/howto/story/0,24330,3316458,00.html

--M

Thanks Missy,  for the quick & intellegent reply.
My own limited experience lends credence to the excellent answer Missy provided.