Migrating to i5 2500K without reinstalling Windows 7

K

kwatch

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 28, 2006
Messages
81
I purchased ASUS P8P67 PRO and i5 2500K bundled deal from Microcenter last week. I'll probably replace Q9550 and Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P motherboard this weekend. I've normally reinstalled operating system whenever I replaced CPU and motherboard. Is there any way I can use existing windows 7 64 bit?
 
You might be able to get away with it in Win7...but I wouldn't even bother trying. Why would you want to muck up a new system with old, left over drivers and a clapped out registry? It take 20 minutes to install Win 7 on a mechanical hard drive- even faster if you have a bootable thumdbrive or a SSD.
 
I went from a p5wdh (975x) to ud5+2600k (P67) without needing to reinstall windows 7; it ust complained a bit and installed the basic chipset drivers, and then I installed the stuff from the CD and I was fine. Pretty sure W7 wipes the hardware HAL when it sees a device change. Not sure how it does it without crashing though. I had to call microsoft to reactivate though.

XP will blue screen unless you do a repair install. With a dual boot, repair installing XP will temporarily overwrite the W7 boot sector, but the W7 dvd can repair that if you boot from it.
 
Last edited:
I replaced an EX58-UD3R with my P8P67 Pro and Windows wouldn't boot.

Not that it mattered much, even if it does boot I'd still strongly recommend reloading Windows.
 
I replaced a Asus P5Q-E P45 to a Asus P8P67 Pro without issues. Used the same windows install.

It's best to reinstall but I took the lazy way out to save time. At worst you have to reinstall windows.
 
I went from an Abit P35 board to my Asus P8P67 Pro w/out any problems. I figured I'd give it a shot and if it worked, great. If not, I just made a backup beforehand so whatever.
 
Do a reinstall, It's always nice to start a system fresh.
Back up your stuff.
Back up your firefox profile (if you have one)
Back up your email
Also back up your steamapps folder if you have steam.
I have a drive dedicated to steam so I just renamed the folder for steam to SteamOLD and then reinstalled on a new SSD and then reinstalled just the client for steam and then moved the steamapps fold and the games were good to go..save a ton of time.
 
WillC310 said:
I went from an Abit P35 board to my Asus P8P67 Pro w/out any problems. I figured I'd give it a shot and if it worked, great. If not, I just made a backup beforehand so whatever.
Click to expand...

Did you anything special?
 
I have seen windows 7 handle hardware changes pretty well. I went from a Asus P5Q (Intel P45) to a Asus M4A77D (AMD 770) without reinstalling windows 7. My first bootup was slower than usual, then windows 7 installed all the system drivers and rebooted. Everything worked without an issue afterwards,

Yes, it was fine with me switching from Intel to AMD.

It has been more than 4 months now with 0 issues, so it may be possible.

This was on 64 bit Windows 7 professional.
 
I did a windows full system backup to another HD, internal or external no matter, and let it create a system recovery disk (mine was a blank DVD disk). Once done it's for Win 7 version you made the disk from.
Once you get your systems Bios configured for the drives your using and the boot order with your CD/DVD drive first. Put the recovery disk in you make and follow the directions. EASY as PIE! :D

I did my laptop that way too.

BYW....... this method is only when you use a blank OS drive as you really don't need to do anything with a motherboard swap but do it and run it. Windows will do the rest. Like skruideli said.
 
Last edited:
I suspect going from an X58 to a P67 board causes problems because some of the drivers/hardware are similar enough that windows doesn't clear the HAL properly and fails. Obviously, a P35 or socket 775 board won't that issue. Windows DID refuse to erase my floppy drive connector, though...had to do it myself...
 
Pulled my P5Q Pro and Installed P8P67 Pro plugged in started right up. Installed the NIC drivers, USB3 Drivers, Intel INF update, Intel magagement engine interface, bluetooth drivers, sound drivers, Asus AI suite, and works perfect.
 
kwatch said:
Did you anything special?
Click to expand...

Nope. I had read someplace it's best to put as many drives to the generic ones (ie: video card, ATA, etc) but I didn't. Basically this is what I did:

Made a Acronis image to another HDD
Shutdown the PC
Assembled new PC
Plugged everything in, turned it on and crossed my fingers
2 reboots
1 Windows Activation
Done.
 
Hostile said:
You might be able to get away with it in Win7...but I wouldn't even bother trying. Why would you want to muck up a new system with old, left over drivers and a clapped out registry? It take 20 minutes to install Win 7 on a mechanical hard drive- even faster if you have a bootable thumdbrive or a SSD.
Click to expand...

The time invested in paving and starting over is much more about re-installing all the software and updates which typically takes me days. It takes me 2 days simply to get all my dev tools installed, configured and updated. Takes a week to get all the games I'm playing down from Steam.

But I always pave and start clean with a mobo replacement. A completely new chipset? You bet I'm going to start over. There are many optimizations Win7 does based on your hardware over time, that is probably why folks are seeing SSD perf go down by not starting clean.
 
WillC310 said:
Nope. I had read someplace it's best to put as many drives to the generic ones (ie: video card, ATA, etc) but I didn't. Basically this is what I did:

Made a Acronis image to another HDD
Shutdown the PC
Assembled new PC
Plugged everything in, turned it on and crossed my fingers
2 reboots
1 Windows Activation
Done.
Click to expand...

Did this exact same thing going from a c2d on a p5ne-sli to a 2600k on a p8p67 pro with no issues whatsoever.
 
Falkentyne said:
I went from a p5wdh (975x) to ud5+2600k (P67) without needing to reinstall windows 7; it ust complained a bit and installed the basic chipset drivers, and then I installed the stuff from the CD and I was fine. Pretty sure W7 wipes the hardware HAL when it sees a device change. Not sure how it does it without crashing though. I had to call microsoft to reactivate though.

XP will blue screen unless you do a repair install. With a dual boot, repair installing XP will temporarily overwrite the W7 boot sector, but the W7 dvd can repair that if you boot from it.
Click to expand...

Are you using an OEM windows 7?
 
seamusmc said:
But I always pave and start clean with a mobo replacement. A completely new chipset? You bet I'm going to start over. There are many optimizations Win7 does based on your hardware over time, that is probably why folks are seeing SSD perf go down by not starting clean.
Click to expand...

What he said. There's a lot more to how the OS installs itself than just files. The various drivers and devices all have their own setup issues. Yes, this is tedious. Win7 does seem to make it less worse than with previous versions, as many drivers are already included with the OS. But many aren't. That and you don't want to have the old drivers or software for them installed causing potential problems with new stuff.

So you have to decide what's worse, safely reinstalling from scratch or dealing with a never-ending series of complications due to leftover junk. The time spent now to do a fresh install will no doubt be less than trying to untangle the old crap.
 
I just switched from AMD to Intel and Win 7 was fine with it. I just had to call to reactivate. I did uninstall all hardware drivers before I switched though. I did back everything up before I did this but things are running so smooth I am not sure I will bother doing a fresh install. Very impressed with the 2500K and Intel in general after exclusively using AMD for 10+ years. Things are so much snappier then my old Phenom 955 was.
 
I just went from a EP45-UD3P and a Q9550 to P8P67 Pro with 2600K and didn't bother reinstalling, and everything has been just fine (well, everything that isn't BIOS related, like the S3 sleep issue). We aren't talking Windows XP here, Win 7 will be just fine with that switch. If you want, make an image before you make the switch just to be safe, but really, it took one reboot and I was back to running.

I just don't buy the "never ending series of complications" stuff from not re-installing. Is there some deactivated stuff in the registry or somewhere that applies to old hardware? Maybe, but deactivated is deactivated.

And, worst case, it doesn't go well, you wipe and re-install then.
 
Forceman said:
I just don't buy the "never ending series of complications" stuff from not re-installing. Is there some deactivated stuff in the registry or somewhere that applies to old hardware? Maybe, but deactivated is deactivated.

And, worst case, it doesn't go well, you wipe and re-install then.
Click to expand...

+1.

I would say go for it...but if you end up with all kinds of problems after you're done, reinstall on a clean HD.

My experience is just like Forceman's. I managed to {so far, knock wood!} avoid many of the problems others are dealing with. We'll see.
 
Always back up your important data before you start.

I upgraded from a Core2Duo 6850 to and i7-2600k, from Intel DP35DP motherboard to the P8P67. Even had a 2 drive raid setup. Simply swapped boards+cpu's and it actually booted right up. Windows went crazy for about 2 reboots installing tons of new drivers - but it worked at least.

Only bad thing was that the RAID went from being a 2 disk RAID 1 (mirror) to RAID 0 (stripe). I couldn't get the controller to see the set as the RAID 0 I started it as, so I had to destroy the raid set and create the RAID 1, then re-install everything anyway. Bummer.
 
I've done many upgrades even in the 2k days without reinstalls and probably about 3-4 with XP with NO issues. I might try my luck with a 2500/2600k sometime soon but moving now so funds are a bit short. Oddly enough when I did a fresh install of W7 because I wanted the AA in BF2 it had issues as I had the semi common unexplainable 50-60% gpu usage which limited my frames go figure! :p
 
Hostile said:
You might be able to get away with it in Win7...but I wouldn't even bother trying. Why would you want to muck up a new system with old, left over drivers and a clapped out registry? It take 20 minutes to install Win 7 on a mechanical hard drive
Click to expand...
Maybe so but windows alone isn't much use. By the time you have installed everything else you want and got it configured the way you like it's likely to have taken you a LOT more than 20 minuites.
 
I replaced my socket 775 motherboard with a sandybridge setup a week ago and didn't reinstall or reformat, just took out old hardware, put in new hardware, started PC, windows installed drivers, then rebooted and reactivated.

It has worked perfect ever since. No issues, no complications, the most stress free motherboard upgrade I have ever done.
 
Same here, went from an X38 (Asus Maximus Formula) with 2 1TB drives in RAID 0 (on the Intel controller) to a P8P67 Pro, once I set the drives to RAID instead of the default ACPI, it booted right up. Only basic functionality that didn't work was the on-board NIC. Even audio was working.

Promptly installed the drivers from the install CD, LAN was working, reactivated Windows 7 x64, rebooted and haven't had any OS related issues since then.

It's been a over two weeks of heavy usage, gaming to work to benchmarking.

TLDR; Do it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top