Switching motherboards

[vixtran]

Greetings all, I have aquestion. On windows NT server when you switch a motherboards, can you just hook up the drive and expect it to boot? I know you have to add things for the new MB, but will the server still boot correctly before they are added? If not, what can I do to get it to boot correctly if anything?

thanks in advance.

 

[jrbarnett]

Hello

It may boot without problems, but only if the peripherals and disk controller are identical between boards. It won't be a problem if you use a PCI SCSI controller for the drives, but onboard IDE controllers in cheap ones may cause problems if they are not exactly identical between models.
The same for the graphics card and other onboard peripherals - eg NIC etc.

If the peripherals are a close match you could try booting in VGA mode and it may do the trick, and then change the drivers and reboot.
If however its a completely different setup, I would do a fresh install.

John

 

[vixtran]

John thanks for your reply. After much time today, it turns out the other board I was using had a problem. I am guessing the problem is with the bios since when I tried to get in, as soon as I got in they went blank. This happened for both NT sever OS drive and a win 98 drive. The difference, is the win98 drive booted and loaded. Computers never stop surprising me. The fault was caused by a power supply I used to test to see if the other power supply was bad in the case. The bad thing about that, was this supply has killed 3 MB's over the past few days without me even realizing it. I take it as a lesson well learned. I got another MB and nt sever booted just fine with little or no adjustments. Also, the board was totally different from the last, so I consider myself very lucky.

thanks again

Jeff