going to a 64 bit system... do I need to reinstall windows?
botkiller
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hi everyone,

I'm going to be going from an old AMD system to a 64 bit system with a new motherboard, and I'm wondering; will I have to reinstall windows on my hard drive to get everything to work right? I am running winxp pro SP2. I basically really do not want to go thru the reinstallation process again - I've been on this hard drive for over a year and I'm quite set up nicely on it, and doing all my configurations and reinstalls will take a long time. I've read up on the MS Sysprep.exe tool to be used in conjunction with acronis true image to clone the hard drive, but it seems that that is only for upgrading the hard drive as well, something I don't need to do at all. I just want to keep my original application structure and the like. Can I drop the hard drive onto the new system, or will I get blue screens of death? If that happens, can I do a soft reinstall of windows (not format, just reinstall windows to keep my original file structure), or am I just screwed here and should I just format and reinstall?

Your help and expertise is much appreciated. Thanks!
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jeffd
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Hi botkiller, bad news first: there's almost no chance of a successful running of your old xp on the new mobo.

Good news? Well, it's not great, but here it is: set up your new mobo and processor, then install the hard drive, and see if windows will boot. I just did almost exactly the same thing, moved from an amd athlon 32 bit processor and soyo mobo to a new athlon 64 + msi mobo. Same thought as you, was hoping windows would not bluescreen.

Sad story is: Failed boot on both Windows 2k and XP, that's what I'd guess you'll experience too. Had to reinstall both, pain in the rear end, like you said, you have to reconfigure everything, takes forever.

That's life, it's why I try to avoid upgrading as much as possible, and why I now get the best hardware I can, so that if I do want to upgrade, the mobo will support cpu and hard drive upgrades in the future.

If you were running Linux of some type there's a chance that it might work, but it's still a chance it won't. On windows there's an almost 100% chance that xp will either bluescreen or give you strange and unsolveable issues even if by some weird chance it actually boots up.

All advice I've ever read on this, and all my experience confirms this advice: do a fresh install no matter what, even if it does boot, it will probably never be quite right.

Best odds by the way of a successful boot are if you boot into safemode, F8, but it's still very unlikely to succeed.
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botkiller
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hi Jeff,

thanks very much for your input. That's what I figured it would be. Did you have to do a complete format and reinstall, or did you just have to reinstall windows over your old version without formatting your HD? Thanks a ton.
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jeffd
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botkiller, this is what I did:

  1. Build new box.
  2. Before installing the old hard drive with windows on it, use a linux live cd to make sure everything is working. I use kanotix because it has pretty good hardware recognition. The live cd will simply boot linux into ram, it won't install it onto your hard drive. This is a good first test of any new box, you can make sure everything is recognized and working.
  3. Once you're sure it's all working, attach the xp containing hard drive. Reboot into it. Remember, this will trigger the activation for xp since all the hardware just changed.


At this point, xp will do one of two things:
  1. boot up, then request drivers for the new hardware [odds of that happening? 1% I'd guess, or less, and that's if you boot into safemode [F8 on boot].
  2. bluescreen on boot.

If it blue screens, you can try using the rescue mode for xp, but I've never had much luck with that. But you can try it, maybe it will sort of work. But don't get your hopes up.

A fresh, reformatted [NTFS of course] install is always better, but you can always try if you want to see what happens, since you'll probably have to reinstall you might as well see if you have luck with the easier steps first.

Doing an xp recovery install may save some of your data etc, but I doubt it will do much good. I wouldn't do it, although having to reinstall all your programs etc, what a pain. It's that annoying registry stuff, almost all programs write to it on install, most major ones anyway, and you can't really run most of them without the registry.

Again, you can always try, some programs will run as if it's their first install, some won't. Just keep the program files folder backed up, same for all your data.

I use 2 partitions for windows, 1 for the os and programs, one for the my documents, email, and anything else that will grow over time. Makes reinstalls a lot easier. 20 gig for OS+programs, and the rest for the data. My Documents can be redirected to a new folder on the data partition easily. Email can be stored there a little less easily.
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botkiller
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ok, so that sounds like it makes sense. I doubt that I'm going to get the old HD to work on my system with the old install of winblows, so I'm working to make peace with the fact that I'm going to have to do a reinstall of it and all my programs. I'm considering doing the double partition thing... but, my HD is formerlly partitioned as only one part... is there a way that I can make a new partition on the drive that I can do a clean install of windows to? I forget if I can do this when I install XP or not.. it would be best to do this as then I would not have to kill myself over having to format the HD because of the 100+ gigs of data on it that I can't afford to lose and backing up takes forever, so I think I'd like to do this on this install, to save the trouble. If you know of how to do that, I'd love to find out.

oh, and thanks for the tips on kanotix, that's a very good idea.
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jeffd
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:: Quote ::
is there a way that I can make a new partition on the drive that I can do a clean install of windows to? I forget if I can do this when I install XP or not...


Yes, it's fairly easy. If you have partition magic, you can use that, but you'd need the partition magic boot floppies to achieve this.

Otherwise, you can use something like gparted, which can resize and reformat your existing single partition, as long as you have 20 gigabytes or so free on your drive. This thread covers gparted.

No matter what you used, you should always backup your data in any case before partitioning, that's just good practice since something can go wrong, for example if the power goes out in your house the partitioning would fail, and you'd lose all your data.

So you'd need the following: 20 gigs at least free on your current hard drive. A partitioning tool.

Then you resize the main partition you currently have, except you have it start at the end of the partition, not the beginning. Once it's resized, create a new ntfs partition on the empty first 20 gigs. This is what you will install xp onto.

And no, xp does not have a real built in partitioning too, they just have an ultra basic thing that lets you can create your main partition, and format it, and create more partitions, but not format them. If you want something that includes a real partitioning program you have to use linux. The gparted livecd is a very good partitioning program, it runs on a stripped down linux. Some disks are harder to partition than others, recently I had one where partition magic 7 failed, gparted 0.2 failed, but then I went back to gparted 0.1 and it worked fine.

Again, backup your data before you do this.

When you resize the main partition you have now, what you think of as your 'c:\' drive, xp will no longer be available to you, it won't boot. So once you do that that's it, no going back.

However, you will still have all the user configuration files from your software available.

This is reason number absolute 1 why I always use partitions, two at least, one for the os/programs, and one for the data. Sometimes I use a lot more, depends. Windows encourages extremely bad practices in order to keep it as 'user friendly' as possible [although right about now it's probably not feeling that friendly, no?].
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botkiller
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great, thanks for that input. I actually used to do everything on partitions working in unix, but in my past years of not doing sysadmin work i've fallen out of good practice and now it's biting me. I'll fool around with it. I can't afford much downtime right now so I might just have to stick with my current setup, but I'm also thinking about just getting an 80 gig SATA and running winblows off that at all times in the near future. then I won't have to worry about this cr#p.

thanks a ton for all your input... I'm hoping to do the install today, as I've already had my new gear for over a week and I wanna see it installed!

thanks again.
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