Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

[Wizard]

No brickbats please. I have work to do with this customer's computer.
I rather do not trust the Acer mainboard (intermittent onboard video corruption) and have picked up a new board to replace this with.

But I need to know a method to swap out boards and don't have to reinstall. I have researched several solutions but I wanted to ask to make sure I'm on right track. I will use the magic jellybean to vertify the COA sticker on the Acer case and use the key to activate the vista OS.

Let discuss on your solution to this board swap and preserve everything it had installed yet support new board. I know have to use different drivers for the hardware.

Cheers, Wizard

[yyonline]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

I've done this with XP with mixed results.

I've never tried it with Vista. I've had to reinstall Vista after cloning hard drives. It seems Vista is much fussier regarding hardware than XP. For the best chance of success, I'd try to find a replacement board with the same chipset, or at least one in the same family, otherwise you may end up having to do a repair install.

[seanc]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

Many people ask this question, everyone says 'do a repair install'.
Let's make this clear, here and now, repair installs are a last resort.

Does the old board still boot the OS?
If yes, change the driver for the mass storage controllers to PCI IDE.

If no, what chipset is the old Acer board running, what is the new one running?

The key currently being used on the installation is likely the System Locked Pre-installation key and won't match the one on the case. Not to worry, you can use the one on the case. Just ensure that the key on the case, matches the version of Windows that's installed.

[dood]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

I keep a PCI controller card around for this reason. Install the controller, boot up the PC with the drive on the motherboard, instlal the drivers for the controller. Shutdown, and hook the drive to the controller. Boot up and ensure that it's working. Shut down, move drive and controller to other PC. Boot up other PC with drive on the PCI controller. Install all the motherboard drivers. Shut down, plug drive into motherboard, boot up, ensure everything works.

[Wizard]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

Dood's procedure trickery came close on final step, boot up Vista on new mainboard's onboard SATA after installed drivers with PCI-SATA controller card. Except I get blank screen the instant mainboard booted HD. Usually you would get bad boot and repeat trying booting error thing but this is different this time.

Did not get activation/disactivation flag up. Behaved normally during the installing the drivers and boots fine with the PCI-SATA card adapter.
I'm not going to leave the PCI-SATA card in there.

Went from Acer junky mainboard to M4A785-M (good one as I have one like that in use at work).

Cheers, Wizard

[seanc]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

What mode is the on-board SATA set to?

[Wizard]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

I didn't change anything. The WHOLE point is able to move the HD without altering anything except put drivers on to support new board. I followed Dood's instructions.

Cheers, Wizard

[dood]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

I'm not seeing anything I missed in my procedure... It's always worked for me with XP and 7, but I don't see many Vista machines (thank God).

[steve2]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

If Acer is like emachines, Hp, Dell, and others that sell pre-packaged products , then you have to replace with the same motherboard or the OS will not work. The ghost/shadow program they use will not let a different board work.

[seanc]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

That should only be true for the actual restore CD, once Windows is installed you can do what you want with it.

What drivers do you have installed for the storage controllers now Wizard?

[steve2]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

Well, that's good to know. I had tried it a few years ago with the restore disks and it wouldn't take them. So I bought an original board ($119) and it failed at 13 months also. Since then I have repaired the original boards as emachine boards are priced too high and fail again.

[Wizard]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

I followed the Dood's to the letter.

The problem goes like this after I completed the drivers install for the new mainboard the HD now plugged into new mainboard. POST fine then froze instantly with blank screen on the LCD when mainboard reads the boot sector and few bytes of boot strap data. That is the point where usually mainboard bios would put up boot error/no OS found.

I'm very reluctant to attempt the repairs to make this HD bootable with the new mainboard. So I need more help.

I have known there are many different bios like Award, Phoenix, AMI etc, some of them have different ways of laying out the hard drive mapping by their different methods of formulas (aka: LBA, CHS...) that can influence the
ability to boot or not. The PCI to SATA is compatible with the boot sector location that was originally put in by OS while hooked to the old mainboard long ago.

Cheers, Wizard

[dood]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

I would try a repair install of Vista. Or does it have a similar option to Windows 7, where you can have it attempt to repair startup issues by itself?

However, I would also do a full backup of the drive before proceeding (I use Symantec Ghost to back up customer PCs before I do anything crazy)

[Scenic]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

what i usually try is to set the onboard SATA controller to IDE/PATA mode, let it boot up, install the chipset drivers (which includes the SATA controller drivers), reboot and switch back to SATA or AHCI mode (whatever it was before).

every OS knows how to "talk" to IDE/PATA without additional drivers

[seanc]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

I would also try the startup repair option - yes dood Vista does have that too.

I would get the HDD back to booting on the old motherboard and clone it using Ghost or Clonezilla.

What is the chipset of the Acer board? I see the new board is an AMD 785G/SB710 - I've not much experience with this one.

What I do is:
Change the SATA/IDE controller drivers to PCI IDE. Reboot to check things keep working.
I then make sure (if Vista/W7) that the drivers for nVidia/Intel/VIA/SiS are set to start at boot - you may have to do this in the registry. Then shutdown and move the HDD.
Pretty much works all the time.

If you're coming from an Intel chipset and you get a stop 7E - disable the IntelPPM service/driver.

[Wizard]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

For strange reason this M4A785-M bios had LBA defaulted to off. Now LBA is on
and had to use IDE mode for SATA to boot. AHCI made stop error to occur (I think 7Dxxxxxx)

Sounds like Acer really cheapened out!

Old board is 740G, new board is 785G. Big jump in quality and performance.
Acer board only has one polymer cap, this new board have these everywhere.

I now have 2 in device manager that I need to fix:

6to4 adapter.

Unknown device which is "ACPI\ATK0110". Not needed
and how can I do about this?

Cheers, Wizard

[dood]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

If you uninstall them, do they repopulate themselves? If so, you're missing some MB drivers somewhere.

[Wizard]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

Tried. Does not fix, I even tried to put in correct drivers and vista spat back saying "this driver does not apply to vista". Vista is 32 bits.

Cheers, Wizard

[dood]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

Disable and ignore?

[yyonline]

Re: Move installed Vista to new mainboard.

I've seen ATK0110 before. I think it's an Asus specific thermal monitoring hardware? What model motherboard is this?