Complete hardware upgrades and XP Pro

[Silverman]

Soon I'll be upgrading from a P3 1 ghz on a Via chipset platform to a P4 on an Intel platform. Some of the parts will be transferred over like the hard drives and O.S., Cdrom DVD and CDRW. I am well aware of the fact that XP Pro probably won't like it one bit so all data has been backed up. The question is, what preperations in XP should I make before the final shutdown of the P3 rig before the big move? Any suggestions to get XP to detect new hardware (chipset, controllers, etc.) without having XP fall flat on it's face on the first boot? Thank you for your suggestions..

[mrwilhelm]

The standard proceedure is to boot into safe mode, then go into the device manager and remove all the devices. Then you should be able to shutdown and change mobos.

This works most of the time. The only thing I worry about in going from a VIA to an Intel chipset is the IDE controller. Sometimes the change will prevent the new system from successfully booting from the hard drive.

[Silverman]

Thanks for the speedy reply, I had considered the IDE controllers might be a problem so I have opted to move the off board ATA controller along with the Harddrives...at least until I am certain that all is well with the hardware detection in XP, which in my opinion is pretty good, with all the hardware swapping I have done in this aging P3 system.