Possible to upgrade to Athlon without fresh install of Win98SE?

[Fat Tone]

Hi Guys - I have my Athlon (550@800, £200) on the way from overclockers.co.uk, and have a couple of questions. I'll be watching Muad'dib's thread for Mobo advice, but the main question is can I do the upgrade without a complete fresh Win98SE install? I've done it before on Win95 by deleting all the motherboard-specific components out of system in device manager. A few reboots later and all was ok.

Cheers, Tony.

[Jammrock]

What he said.

Jammrock

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PIII 450@504, 256 MB RAM, 35 GB total w/ WD Experts, Abit UDMA 66 controller, CL 6x DVD, PLEXTOR 8x4x32 ATAPI CD-RW (my newest toy), G400 32 MB DH, SB Live! w/ Digital I/O, LinkSys Etherfast 10/100, DSI 56k modem, Addtronics 6896A Case w/ a crap load of fans and Dynmat noise dampening, MAG DX715T monitor.

Hi, my name is Jammrock. I'm a computer phreak and an EverCrack addict.

[moreau]

I'm not an athlon owner, but given the chipset specific drivers and patches, you probably are knocking on the door of the third ring of hell if you try it.

If you do just swap you HD to the new MB, with a new chipset, there is a possibility the IDE controller won't be able to find the master boot record. There

are ways to fix where the master boot record lives, but I've not attempted it.

See: http://www.promise.com/techsupport/T...oller_Card.htm
this is specific to promise cards, but the idea is the same.



[This message has been edited by moreau (edited 07 February 2000).]

[LAMFDTK]

Please try it and post your results

[Fat Tone]

Thanks for the replies. I guess I've got nothing to lose if I back up first. I can always go the whole hog if it fails!

Can't wait for an Athlon 800! Should have all the bits by Sunday - I'll let you know how it goes.

Tony.

[DentyCracker]

I agree with Gurm.

But if you insist on doing so, please ensure that you have all of the patches (miniport and eide) for your board, delete the stuff out of device manager then shut down and install mobo and athlon. Backing up is an excellent idea, but only your datafiles will be of use to you I would think

[Nuno]

From my personal experience, I went from a celeron/Bx to an Athlon/Irongate combo and windows detected it all just fine. No problems whatsoever. Just be sure to use AMD Vgart drivers. I reinstalled all, but just because I got a new hdd. I still have that windows installed in a partition and it boots up fine.

Hint: Don´t use AMD 756 IDE drivers. They are slower than windows generic ide controller divers (but be sure to enable DMA in the cd-rom and hdd)

[Greebe]

Actually I've tried it... and it did work for me, but I don't reccommend it. As Gurm said... a "cluster-****".

[OblivioN]

I switched from an amd k62 to a bxboard once
and I got the worst perfromance ever.

[paul]

It could work, but the time you spend weeding out the problems, you could re-install windows and your apps with a fresh start (which occasionally seems to be needed).

I've gone from Pentium systems to AMD's and they always worked.

[DentyCracker]

Try it first, If it is usable benchmark it. Then, kill it reinstall and bechmark again, you will probably see a slight improvement.
I moved between all kinds of systems, depending on the state of the registry, it is usually either pretty smooth, or hellish, even with the same move (on different occasions). But being curious do it and let us know (but no whining )

[Fat Tone]

It's not too long since I put 98SE on, and then it was difficult at first to get my PCI128 and G400 to coexist, hence wanting to try the lazy way first. I'm certainly gonna try it, and, no, I won't moan if it doesn't work.

Tony.

[MXR4LIFE]

You could try booting into safe mode (F8) and going directly into Device Manager and remove everything...reboot.

Or even do the above, then on reboot have the W98 Startup Disk in floppy (for CD) and your W98 whatever CD in and run Setup.

But there is nothing like a crisp fresh install eh?

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"Hi, my name is Gary and I'm an OC addict"