I have a homebuilt home server and its been running great, but the hardware is a little long in the tooth. I recently retired a much more modern pc that id like to swap the motherboard and proc with. The problem is that i dont want to reinstall WHS and all the crap i did to it. How pissed is window going if all the hardware changes like that? Can i use sysprep /generalize before i do the switch, or will that kill my data array? Im not using raid or anything just 3 IDE hdds and a usb2 external. Current system Amd Athlon xp 2100+ 1024mb ddr333 abit kt7a-raid (via kt266) New System Intel D915GAG Intel Pentium 4 530j 1024mb ddr333
Windows has gotten a lot better over the years at starting on different hardware but disc controllers tends to give problems. Acronis True Image with Universal Resore might be worth looking into. This solution is among other stuff aimed at bare metal restore of installations. An image done with Acronis and restored using Universal Restore gives you the ability to add essential drivers like disk controllers and such. Of course tha activation will fail since that much hw change definitely will take it out of tolerance. Good luck with the project.
Is there any straigt forward way to fix the 7b error etc (due to hardware change) without having to image and then restore an image. It would take a long time and need a spare hard drive or reassemble raid array thanks
Yes, test on actual hardware or read from .driver.inf what entries are required then boot with WinPE, regedit, CriticalDeviceDatabase + required service entries Takes few minutes If you do not know how then maybe this is not for you sebus