[a10thunder]

One of my older computer's power supply failed a few weeks back. While buying a new case, I decided to upgrade the motherboard as well. I was thinking that if I just transfer everything from the old motherboard to the new one (i.e. processor, memory, cards, and drives) everything will be fine. However, after I installed the new board, my hard disk won't boot up. Everything else seems to be working fine. My computer can boot from the floppy and CD ROM, but it can't seem to access the hard disk. I get a boot disk error message. I tried changing the jumper setting between cable select and master, but neither seems to make a difference. The BIOS does detect the HD as the primary master. And I'm sure both the IDE cable and power cable are fine. Does anyone have any idea on how to fix this problem? I backed up everything before I switched motherboards, so I guess I can reinstall Win2k. However, I would really like to restore my old system.

My new motherboard is an Abit VH6T running on a PIII 733 CPU.

[Dirty Harry]

What are you saying here- that you can't boot from the hard disk or that the hard disk is invicible after you've booted ?

As a rule, you shouldn't, and often simply cannot pick a HD with OS installed from an old Mobo and plug it in on a new system and just boot. Different chipsets etc are not recognized on the fly with W2K or XP. With older OS's this was not that much of a problem. A reinstall is the only way to go. There are some tricks that might circumvent this, but not worth tring IMO.

If you again are saying that you can't see / access the old HD at all when you've booted from somewhere else - could it be that you boot with a DOS /w98 boot disk etc and the HD is NTFS formatted. Then you can't access it, its not a bug its a MS "feature".

H.

[Brian Frank]

Dirty Harry pretty much said it all. Unless you got a mobo with the same chipset, you need to reinstall Windows. And while you can get around it, you just end up having to reinstall Windows later anyway. That's one good thing about keeping your OS on a different partition: just format that one when necessary and reinstall Windows. While you still need to reinstall all your apps, the data (saved games, mp3s, nudie pix, secret deathstar plans, etc. :p) are still there.

[a10thunder]

Thanks for the replies. I guess a reinstall is in order. I'll miss my nudie pix.

[SHS]

a10thunder reinstall in to new folder then back up what you want then start clean install

[der King Mongo]

without blowing away your data...

[thekourier]

I was thinking about doing the same thing, replacing my KT133 motherboard with a new KT333 one. I've got the latest VIA 4n1 drivers installed and I figured it shouldn't be too much of a problem since the chipset is the same line. Anyone gone from KT133 to KT333 without reinstalling?

[Brian Frank]

Just because it has KT in it doesn't mean you can just jump over to another KT chipset w/o a hassle. Some review I saw had the guy going from a KT133 to a KT133A chipset (same manufacturer, board with new chipset), and he had to do a clean install to get things running.