The Quintessential Flaw with Windows 2000

[IanGlinka]

You have a computer... with Windows 2000 on it. Your old Abit motherboard decides to go bad one day. You need to replace the motherboard. You can't get that model of Abit motherboard anymore, because it's OOP. You have three brand new intel Pentium 4 motherboards/processors sitting on the shelf doing nothing. Wouldn't it be great if you could just replace the motherboard and processor in the system? You can't. If you had any other operating system on your machine, it would be fine, but because you have Windows 2000, there's nothing you can do. You have to build a new computer and reinstall all the applications on a separate hard drive, then copy over and documents or personal files from your old hard drive to your new system.

If you don't believe me, try taking the hard drive out of your Windows 2000 machine and putting it into a computer that does not have the same brand motherboard. You're going to get a STOP error when you start the machine. Microsoft knows about it, and they even have a page set up to try to explain their solution/work-around, but it is soooo complicated.

Why isn't this easier?

Ian

 

[wolluf]

This is true for all flavours of Windows - not just 2k.

Also, sometimes its ok - Windows reloads all the new drivers and continues (I take it you can't get into safe mode - so you could remove devices in device manager? Have you tried a repair reinstall? Boot from Windows install CD, choose new installation. It should find your installation and offer to repair it (type R). Take this option - and hopefully it will load appropriate drivers for your new hardware during the reinstall. This leaves apps, settings and data intact, but looses windows updates - but it doesn't always work).

There is a FAQ (also quite complicated) on this forum, but the author is currently rewriting it (so its not available at the moment).
There are also various methods if you know about the move ahead of time - which unfortunately you didn't with a board failure.

 

[Teamaker]

I have moved hard drives between test machines on a couple of occasions and had no probs, Windows booted and started PNP after 20 mins or so the systems were up and running.

So it's not every time, also i agree with Wolluf if you run a repair this will quite often sort the prob.