I recently replaced a old broken motherboard after it finally gave in, then reclaimed a used mobo gathering dust from a friend. After installing the hardware it boots into bios fine.
Can anyone recommend with web links some bootable USB drive software or something I can use to adjust the drivers for first booting into the the current windows install with the new mobo? Yes, I fully expect to reinstall windows as the next step, but there are a few things I need to rescue from the past OS first.
You cannot change windows drivers without booting into the windows install you want to change the drivers on.
If your objective is to copy some files off of the windows drive, just make a live Linux USB of your distro of choice and boot into the distro. Then you can mount the windows drive and your backup drive and copy the files.
If the old and new motherboards are on the same socket, then you can try booting the windows drive directly without any changes. WIndows 7 and above are pretty good at automatically changing the drivers if you move the motherboard.
I am happy to take your advice, hough I thought I watched someone do as I mentioned with a bootable recovery USB by “Paragon.” though I cannot seem to find the same software that video depicted
It is something that I think I very much need to run the original windows install as it is because it’s not just copying files but also accessing accounts of which I cannot reproduce the log in method in another install as I have since lost passwords and there is also not an alternative password recovery.
Everything else in the system is identical except the motherboard
The new motherboard uses the same chipset as the old motherboard
You did not use raid or any other advanced HDD features from the old motherboard
(depends on what cpu generation you have) You have ACHI vs IDE and or UEFI vs CSM set the same as the old motherboard
Then you should be able to boot it up just fine, maybe with a couple extra minutes of setting up new devices. You may need to install network and sound drivers if it has a different chips for those functions, but windows should boot up fine.
There is a good possibility that you will still be able to boot into your original windows installation even if you are using a completely new platform as long as you didn’t have some complicated drive setup as @TheCakeIsNaOH mentioned.
Case in point. I recently swapped platforms completely. ASUS X99 w/ Intel i7-5930k to a ASRock Taichi Ultimate AM4 w/ R7-2700x. I was still able to boot into my original installation of Windows 10 since it was installed on a single NVME drive. The windows installation will mostly likely no longer be activated due to the major hardware change though. Windows took a little while to setup the new devices but everything worked. I did a fresh install after I double checked that I wasn’t going to lose anything.
So I am able to boot into safe mode. After about 5 minutes the display say no input. I believe it is still running.
I’m guessing this is also the case with a normal boot but the windows loading screen is longer than that 5 minutes and I never see the machine boot normally.
Presumably that’s a problem I need to deal with the GPU later. The problem doesn’t happen when I change the hdmi to the mobo socket.
However one problem I have now is not being able to use a mouse or keyboard. They work perfectly fine with the bios and pre boot menus but once I’m in windows they are not recognized.
However the keyboard and mouse issue persists. Very rarely whenerver I turn the machine on and off again it will be able to use the mouse and keyboard. I test every time by manually selecting the boot drive, and each time in boot menus the keyboard works fine despite later not working the vast majority of the time once the machine boots up
Well chaging motherboards without a re-install of windows can either be a hit or miss really.
Sometimes it works with no problems, but other times you could run into issues.
Most of the time if you stay on the same platform then it basically should not be too much of a problem.
The only main issue you will run into is that the os will loose its activation with an oem license.
Still i would highly advice to do a full clean re-install of windows regardless.
Sounds like you won’t need this but I’ll give a tip that could be useful.
My win7 install wouldn’t boot properly on my x399 board. I was able to pass the raw disk to a VM and boot into windows from virtualbox. Open the command prompt and use pnputil to manually install drivers without the hardware present.