Replacing mobo, do I have to reinstall Win 7?

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Camberwell

Gawd
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Like the title says, my Asus P5K-VM died and I'm replacing it with an Asus P5Q Deluxe.

Do I need to reinstall Win 7 (Home Premium 64 bit, retail), which is on my SSD?
 
Camberwell said:
Like the title says, my Asus P5K-VM died and I'm replacing it with an Asus P5Q Deluxe.

Do I need to reinstall Win 7 (Home Premium 64 bit, retail), which is on my SSD?
Click to expand...

^I'm not sure that you HAVE to (although the OCD side of me would, lol)..

Win7 should load the correct drivers for the new motherboard on first boot... this has been the case for me thus far anyways (have done this 3 times in the past few months for various builds)..
 
intel to intel you should be fine. like cyrus said the OCD side of me would want to reinstall also.
 
I change MB more than I change socks, I generally always reinstall, less conflict to worry about.

But, that said, if the chipset is the same, you might be able to get away with it.:D
 
The chipset is the most important thing to consider. If it's the same then there should be no issues.
 
I would, but sometimes you can get away with the mobo switch without issue. I've done it a few times in the past anyway.
 
Old chipset is G33, new one is P45. Looks like I'd better set some time aside this weekend to reinstall!
 
I swapped an nforce 780i for a P45 and because I didn't have time to reinstall, ran it that way for about a week and a half. I had no issues at all but as others have said, my OCD got the best of me and I wiped it. I imagine staying within the Intel chipset family you should be good.
 
That you absolutely have to reinstall is a myth but it does help for stability and compatibility in many instances. You can get by if you know how to take care of things on your own in regard to drivers and some registry work sometimes.

Hell, I still have a harddrive with an XP partition on the backup drive in my computer that dates to 2001. It's the same install that was in my Athlon XP 1700+ on NF2, later I swapped the system to Athlon 64 and Athlon X2 on NF4 and kept the same installation. Then I went nuts and moved the system from NF4 to Intel 775, again without a new installation. I just had to install every single driver manually.
 
i've done it a couple of times and got away with it,but still later on do a fresh install.
 
Would this work:

I have a spare PCI sata card. I install it in Win 7 on my old mobo, and then attach my C drive to it to make sure it works.
Then swap everything over to the new mobo, (including the PCI sata card with my C drive attached), boot into Win 7 and manually install the ICH10R drivers. Then just connect the C drive to the mobo.

What do you think?
 
ive gone from P35 to P45 and it worked fine just after booting it updated the drivers and rebooted and all was good.
i have also gone from x58 to P45 and P55 to X58 and P45 to X58 and most of the time its all good.
on a few occasions i had small issues with drivers causing problems and then did a fresh install to solve it.

but as long as your going from one intel chipset to another the ICH7/ICH8/ICH9/ICH10 will work fine.

i have one HD that has a windows XP install on it that i use to tes new MB quickly when i get them
so i dont have to do fresh installs and this install has had P45,P55,X58 MB's hooked up going back and forth
and it still works great.right now the last MB to be used was a EP45-UD3P and tomorrow i will be hooking
up a eVGA E760 to it before i do a fresh install on my other HD to use with the new E760.and then friday
im getting another EP45-UD3P and will hook it up to it to test it out.
 
I went from and Asus P5N-T Deluxe to Asus P6X58D-E with out reinstalling.
 
My DFI SLI-DR AMD 939 went out recently and when I received my new Intel gear, I just stuck my old HD and it booted. Windows 7 replaced the missing drivers. However, I did notice a few issues regarding stability. My Audio USB ports was not working correctly for example.

I just did a clean install once my new SDD came in. I think you should do the same if you notice performance issues.
 
I'm kind of in the same boat my p35 ds3L just died and I can't decide if I should ebay another of the same mobo or do a full upgrade. Just for the record if I get the same model motherboard again,there should be zero problems right? What if I go from P35 to P55?
 
I just did a mobo swap, but both happened to be intel chipsets,
P965 was the old board and the new board is G31.

Windows 7 and XP both worked great after the swap. XP required 3 restarts and the audio driver installed, then everything worked.
Win 7 worked right away on first boot, just took about 5-10 minutes for all the hardware to get detected and drivers loaded.
 
Out of topic but I installed a minikaze fan on the north bridge HS so the screws scratch into it. Void warranty for sure? Or should I bother RMAing
 
I went from Intel 965 to AMD Athlon II board on Vista with no issues.

Should be fine, normally. Just back your stuff up.
 
Same here. I've been able to get away with it in the past. But just back everything up just in case. :)
 
I would just re-install the OS. It's good to get practice at that sort of thing. =]
 
I had to replace everything but my gfx card and ssd and I did not have to reinstall windows. when it got into windows it just did the found new hardware stuff and installed everything on its own and then said it needs to reboot. zero problems since
 
I've done it, but it took some goofing around with drivers. Would have been faster to just reinstall
 
Camberwell said:
Would this work:

I have a spare PCI sata card. I install it in Win 7 on my old mobo, and then attach my C drive to it to make sure it works.
Then swap everything over to the new mobo, (including the PCI sata card with my C drive attached), boot into Win 7 and manually install the ICH10R drivers. Then just connect the C drive to the mobo.

What do you think?
Click to expand...

Yes.

You do not need to reinstall at all. If you update the SATA driver to the most current one before moving to the new board, it might boot rightup just fine. Likely be a sloow bootup, then once you login it will start finding and installing new device drivers. Once its done and you reboot, it will be back to normal.

I've done this many times in the past, rarely reloading the OS much more than once every 4 years. Main thing is the have the new boards' SATA/IDE/SCSI (whichever you boot to) driver on the C drive ahead of time, and installed if you can. I used a pci scsi card for years, then went to a sata pcie card. Just pick it up and move it, the drivers for the boot drive don't even change, just the mobo devices. Then everything is back to normal.
 
In the end I figured I would just try to plug my C drive straight into the mobo and it has worked just fine. Win 7 installed all of the drivers (including the ICH10R), and everything seems to run smoothly. Obviously if it starts playing up then I will reinstall, but right now I'm glad I tried it this way first, it's saved a bunch of time!
Thanks for your comments everybody, appreciated!
 
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