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I've got Win7 Pro. on an older motherboard and I want to upgrade to a newer one. While I'm at it I'll be upgrading to a larger hard drive. I'm planing to just clone the new drive and then boot from it on the new motherboard. How easy will this be? Will Win7 accept this and I'll just have to update the drivers? Or what? Please don't tell me to do a clean install. That's not in the cards right now. Any and all help would be appreciated.
A lot will depend on the actual difference in the chip-sets and specifically the drivers for the harddrive controller.
Since win 7 is so darn stable I haven't had to do a lot of reloads for windows 7.
If it was me i would
1:Go to msconfig and turn off everything in there completely.
2:Uninstall all the peripheral drivers like sound, usb, ethernet, ide controllers chipset drivers etc etc.
3: Reboot to the bios and turn off USB, SOUND, audio, ethernet,
4: Then clone the system to the new harddrive.
5: Then swap out the drive and put away the old drive in case of problems so that you have a copy.
6: Then swap out the motherboard and boot to windows.
Alternatetly you can use a bare metal restore scenario from Acronis which allows you to
backup the system and specifically the drivers and swap out the board and restore back to bare metal
Remeber there is no silver bullet.
Alot of stuff can and does go wrong
http://www.acronis.com/backup-recove...lbusiness.html
Why would you want to risk bringing corruption across? A lot of people cite time, but lets face it, if something corrupts, you can spend a long time sorting it out.
Bring fresh install back in the picture. By the time you have every driver removed and the system cleaned and ready for the transition you can have the fresh install up and running. Not to mention that you may end up with weird sound and network issues (especially with the common Realtek chips).
Thanks for your input everybody I guess I better rethink my plans.