Geez when Nortons Ghost is no use

[The PIT]

Nortons Ghost is of course no use when you install a new motherboard and neither of your windoze installations want to know.

Tried coaxing Windoze ME this wouldn't have it just bombing out after detecting everything. Xp tried a repair and it just got stuck in a loop. So I bit the bullet and re-installing XP going down to one OS.
The slow bit was all the patches around 60mb + of them via a modem. Took all afternoon. Just the games to install now.

[Technoid]

A tip is to set the HDD controller to use generic/standard IDE controller driver before ghosting

[LvR]

Same for the display drivers - standard VGA normally works every-time.

I generally don't do it that way (Ghost) either after a motherboard upgrade - I just un-install all IDE and displaydriver components and then set the IDE and display drivers to standard - reboot and see all is ok with standard drivers, and only then kill the old hardware.

[Wombat]

Yeah, but a new motherboard is the one thing that can hose it. With Win9x, you need to delete all the "system" devices in the registry before swapping motherboards. With XP, you have to format & reinstall to get it right.

[The PIT]

Originally posted by Technoid
A tip is to set the HDD controller to use generic/standard IDE controller driver before ghosting

XP I uninstalled all the SIS I before the upgrade. Still fell over big style.

ME still wouldn't have worked as I uninstalled every bit of hardware in the end out of frustration and it still fell over. Anyway I was pondering about going over to one OS and this forced the issue. I also only had the 9800 Pro installed and everything bar the serial ports and ide controller turned off.

[agallag]

If you're ghosting a machine to upgrade the motherboard, it's probably a good idea to run sysprep on it before taking the image. I'd use the switches /nosidgen and /pnp, so that it leaves your SID intact, and redetects all hardware during the mini-setup process once it's reinstalled. Can save a lot of hassles.

Edit: only works on W2K or XP of course...

[The PIT]

Ghost was just there to safe guard the data in case the hard drive gets corrupted aka KT133a. It also useful to have just in case when you installing new hardware you stuff it up and have too re-install the orginal image.
In this case for ME it was no go anyway but hadn't had a bad life. Intel to Via Kt133A to Via KT266/a and then SIS 645dx. Got slightly more troublesome this time.
XP I thought I could have rescued via the repair tool so I was a bit careless and should have hit the registry before swapping out. I think looping during repair is mentioned somewhere on Microsofts website.

[Jammrock]

Read up about 'Sys Prep'. It prepares WinXP for ghosting. I think it's part of the System Managment Tools that you have to install from teh i386 folder.

Jammrock

[agallag]

It's on the cd in the support directory. It's in the deploy.cab file, along with a couple other tools.

[The PIT]

Next time in about 6 months eh.
Anyway it working properly now I'm down to one OS on this machine so this will save a load of downloads in future.
Now will I upgrade my win2k machine to XP???

Of course sysprep wouldn't have helped for me though.

[UtwigMU]

Swapping your board without so much as a reinstall (243kB of images) Page 1 2

Arstechnica's board swaping guide.