System Upgrade: repair or fresh Windows install?

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

... had to do an "in-place upgrade" of XP to get it workable.

Would you comment on that? Do you mean you kept your old Windows installation? If so...

I'll be changing my motherboard, at a minimum, because of capacitors failing too and figured the best way was just to start with a fresh Windows install. I don't much care for the full re-install followed by reinstalling & configuring all the programs, but it is really feasible to keep the exiting Windows installation? If that isn't what you mean, then never mind.

- Andy

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Would you comment on that? Do you mean you kept your old Windows installation? If so...

I'll be changing my motherboard, at a minimum, because of capacitors failing too and figured the best way was just to start with a fresh Windows install. I don't much care for the full re-install followed by reinstalling & configuring all the programs, but it is really feasible to keep the exiting Windows installation? If that isn't what you mean, then never mind.

- Andy

I've had some occasions where the computer will just boot and detect all new devices. I suspect I could have done that had I a had a PS2 mouse and keyboard on hand. However, while it was booting to the Ctrl-Alt-Del prompt the mouse and keyboard weren't working.

This caused me to do what is technically referred to as an "in-place upgrade" by Microsoft. Otherwise it's called a repair install by the XP installer. This will essentially upgrade your existing Windows by running the installer on it while keeping all existing programs and registry settings intact.

During the initial XP installation after you've pressed F8 to accept the license it will scan for existing installations and if it finds them will ask if you'd like to perform a repair. At this point you want to tell it that you do.

Keep in mind I've had a few unsuccessful repair installation attempts. However these are usually due to a messed up registry or other corruption. Most of the time they go fine.

After Windows is done installing you'll have to go through the normal routine of running all Windows updates since the service pack level will be at whatever level the install CD is at.

Good luck with your motherboard change.

Edit: Also note that this is not possible with Window Vista or Windows 7. The way the installer works has changed enough that they made it not possible to do an in-place upgrade without both the system being bootable and both DVD and system being at the same service pack level.

[Opus4]

Thanks for the comments. I'm changing just about everything but the case, so I'm sure I'll be better off with a fresh install, though it will be tempting to try an upgrade/repair install to see what happens.

- Andy

[scat]

Andy

Take a look at this: How to install a new motherboard without reinstalling Windows

I have done this many times and no problem.

Scat

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by scat

Take a look at this: How to install a new motherboard without reinstalling Windows

I have done this many times and no problem.

I'll check that & the related MS instructions that I've seen. Maybe I should move this to a new topic about re-installing Windows or repair installing it...

- Andy

[topperdude]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

I've had some occasions where the computer will just boot and detect all new devices. I suspect I could have done that had I a had a PS2 mouse and keyboard on hand. However, while it was booting to the Ctrl-Alt-Del prompt the mouse and keyboard weren't working.

This caused me to do what is technically referred to as an "in-place upgrade" by Microsoft. Otherwise it's called a repair install by the XP installer. This will essentially upgrade your existing Windows by running the installer on it while keeping all existing programs and registry settings intact.

During the initial XP installation after you've pressed F8 to accept the license it will scan for existing installations and if it finds them will ask if you'd like to perform a repair. At this point you want to tell it that you do.

Keep in mind I've had a few unsuccessful repair installation attempts. However these are usually due to a messed up registry or other corruption. Most of the time they go fine.

After Windows is done installing you'll have to go through the normal routine of running all Windows updates since the service pack level will be at whatever level the install CD is at.

Good luck with your motherboard change.

Edit: Also note that this is not possible with Window Vista or Windows 7. The way the installer works has changed enough that they made it not possible to do an in-place upgrade without both the system being bootable and both DVD and system being at the same service pack level.

Originally Posted by scat

Andy

Take a look at this: How to install a new motherboard without reinstalling Windows

I have done this many times and no problem.

Scat

I am also in the process of replacing a motherboard on my DVR server as outlined here. After trying everything in their links to diagnose the old motherboard's problems to try and "revive" it, I finally replaced it with an A7N8X. Now it boots just fine but when Windows is loading up, it gives a BSOD. Noticed while doing a safe boot that the BSOD happens when Windows is trying to load an IO related sys file- which, I'm guessing in turn, may have gotten corrupt when the old motherboard used to constantly and randomly reboot the PC even when Windows was still starting up.

Reading up on the posts in this thread, sounds like I might have to do the repair PC followed by a re-registering? Another option could be to find the DVD with the image of the HDD I had created when the system was stable and before any of the problems started and restore that image. If that works, I am guessing I may need to just re-register the "new" motherboard?

Have bookmarked this thread and will bookmark Andy's thread (if he creates a new one).

Thanks for the all info.
-Topper

[Opus4]

OK, since this topic was continuing, I decided to move it out of Taddeusz's topic about his motherboard issue.

I don't upgrade my PCs very often -- the SageTV server I'm replacing was built in Aug or Sept of 2004, running XP Pro. It is being rebuilt due to what I think is a failed motherboard. I'll be replacing the power supply first in case my take on the capacitors is incorrect. If it really is the ps, then the parts will go to...

My Office PC was built around Feb 2006 and I'll be replacing that this year too; either real soon or a couple months down the road.

With my infrequent system upgrades, I've generally been reinstalling Windows from scratch and then reinstalling & configuring all the apps again. I figured that if a repair install was done, it was very prone to resulting in an unstable system & thus didn't think it was really an option.

So, my question is: is it worth doing a repair Windows install, especially on a 5.5 year old Windows install? A fresh installation would get rid of any lingering things that might cause instability. As usual, I'm indecisive & keep going back & forth on what I want to try this weekend.

- Andy

[korben_dallas]

If you are going to do an in-place repair, I would suggest using a slipstreamed version of XP to whatever service pack you have currently installed on the failed machine.

If you are going to do a new install, then use an SP3 slipstream. It will save you tons and tons of updates download time, install time, and a plethora of reboots.

[davephan]

When I had a system board go bad, I just used image of the old computer and recovered to the replaced system board. I had to do some tweaking with drivers to get everything to work. I made sure the replacement system board had the same chipset, and I used Ghost 9.

Recovering with an image was much quicker than reloading everything from scratch. Doing a clean install is still probably a better method, but I rebuilt with an image to get it done right away. Later, I rebuilt from scratch to better control the SageTV outage time.

I now use both Ghost 9 and Acronis 10 Workstation with universal restore. It is supposed to be possible to recover to different system boards with universal restore.

So, the method you use to recover might be influenced by others in your household, that depend on SageTV working, with controlled outages.

Dave

[Opus4]

I created an SP3 slipstream install CD using nLite. Using it seemed easier than what I did when I created my SP2 slipstream disk several years ago. It also created the iso to burn to a CD.

- Andy

[SWKerr]

I have moved off XP completely at this point but still do installs and recoveries for people. I am always amazed at how much faster a machine is after putting on a fresh load. XP just gets bogged down over time and cleaning up the crapware and using disk utilities does not do as much a a full reinstall for performance.

The one thing I hate about XP is all the service packs and updates needed. It take forever to get it loaded to the point where I start installing apps. Windows 7 takes almost no time to load by comparison and also usually finds all the correct drivers itself.

The only app I hate to reinstall is outlook. There is no way to backup the old setting completely but you have to have it to sync a windows smartphone.

[brainbone]

A bit off topic, but:

I'm not sure how well SageTV server (or supported hardware/tuners) run in ESXi4 (ESXi4 supports pass through for PCI, PCIe devices, but your motherboard must support it -- "VT-d" for Intel, "IOMMU" for AMD), but one way of avoiding dependence on any specific motherboard in the future is to virtualize -- along with the added ability of maximizing your hardware by running more virtual servers on one physical machine.

That said, I have yet to try SageTV in ESXi4.

And to try come full circle back to the topic, with Vmware converter, you can convert existing Windows installations to VMs, provided you can keep your old hardware running long enough.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by SWKerr

I have moved off XP completely at this point but still do installs and recoveries for people. I am always amazed at how much faster a machine is after putting on a fresh load. XP just gets bogged down over time and cleaning up the crapware and using disk utilities does not do as much a a full reinstall for performance.

I assume you are referring to a fresh install running faster on the same hardware, right? This is one of the reasons I figured it would be better to just start fresh.

The only app I hate to reinstall is outlook. There is no way to backup the old setting completely but you have to have it to sync a windows smartphone.

This is what I ran into once before: you can keep the existing emails/database by copying that file, but I don't remember a way to keep the account configurations.

- Andy

[MitchSchaft]

Starting with a fresh install is pretty much standard amongst PC geeks. It helps minimize any quirky problems down the road. It especially clears up any driver issues.

[Tiki]

Save yourself a lot of headaches and do a fresh install...

A couple years ago I had the ethernet port on my Mobo go flakey and didn't have any spare slots for an add-on ethernet card. Replacing the Mobo was the cheapest solution, so I got a more-or-less identical motherboard, but from a different manufacturer (original was Gigabyte, replacement was MSI). Both boards used the same chipsets and had all the same ports and features.

When I swapped the boards, Windows XP would no longer boot (BSOD). I tried a repair installation, had to call Microsoft to re-activate, but problems didn't end there. Windows Update would not work. Worked with Microsoft support they had me change about 1000 registry entries before I could get that working. After all that, I still had to re-install my video card drivers and run HWCLEAR and re-install all my Hauppauge tuner cards. I did eventually get it working, but it took about 20-30 hours spread out over a week.

Since Sage was the only thing I did with that computer, the only reason I didn't want to do a fresh install was to avoid messing around with my video card and capture card drivers. As it turned out, it would have been much faster for me to nuke my hard drive and start from scratch - even if it meant downloading all the service packs and updates (I had to do a bunch of that anyway after the repair installation was complete).

I know some people have been lucky and say this should be fairly trivial, but in my case I should have given up and done a fresh install after the first BSOD.

[Zippster]

Originally Posted by MitchSchaft

Starting with a fresh install is pretty much standard amongst PC geeks. It helps minimize any quirky problems down the road. It especially clears up any driver issues.

Definitely agree. While it may be a bigger pain in the arse up front, it will save you many related issues over time. I like to try and do a complete fresh OS install once a year, I just keep another HD in the machine that has nothing but backups on it so once my main HD is freshly installed its easy to grab things as I need them. Plus with the fresh OS install you ditch any of the programs etc that you never use and forgot about.

[Opus4]

I decided on the full install approach. I built the system over the weekend and have started installing things. One downside to a complete re-install is that I never documented the various registry tweaks I've done, such as the one to increase the network stack size so other PCs can browse the files over my network & others. This time I'm trying to keep track of them. I wouldn't want to do this once a year, though...

Also: I found out that Acronis Disk Director 10 cannot be installed at the same time as Acronis True Image Home 2010. So, unless Acronis updates Disk Director in the near future, I may be looking for a new partition managing app.

- Andy

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Also: I found out that Acronis Disk Director 10 cannot be installed at the same time as Acronis True Image Home 2010. So, unless Acronis updates Disk Director in the near future, I may be looking for a new partition managing app.

- Andy

I am running both on my XP-Pro SP3 machine (I just upgraded to TrueImage 2010 a couple of weeks ago, but haven't seen any problems).

I did a search and it looks like this was fixed back in November. Per the release notes for build 6053 Nov 23, 2009:

List of issues fixed in this update

This section describes the issues that we have fixed in the update.

• Fixed Acronis True Image Home crash after installation of Acronis Disk Director 10
• CEP statistic has more details
• Stability improvement. Fixed ability to back up to DVD mounted to a folder
• Fixed incremental backup in the zip format overwriting previous incremental backup if the @date@ macros is added to the archive name
• Splash screen covering the restore progress window during entire operation of One-click restore

Known issues

If the "start" sector of the backed up system partition is changed during recovery, the partition can be recovered only sector-by-sector (without resizing)

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by Tiki

I am running both on my XP-Pro SP3 machine (I just upgraded to TrueImage 2010 a couple of weeks ago, but haven't seen any problems).

I did a search and it looks like this was fixed back in November. Per the release notes for build 6053 Nov 23, 2009:

Thanks for that info. I hadn't yet looked into it, but I figured I had the latest versions since I downloaded everything the day I installed them; I'll have to double check that.

I got an error in TI that said it couldn't work since an older version of their disk access code was installed. Are you using SATA drives with AHCI enabled? Disk Director can't even see any drives on my new PC when using it from a bootable CD. It saw them from within Windows (but then TI wouldn't run).

- Andy

[Diginerd]

Personally I'd use a Gparted Live CD. Very easy, very flexible and best of all it's free

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

That is for tweaking partitions. Also very handy for cloinging yourisntall for subsequent rapid restoration.

I've used XP repair install more than once and it has saved my hid, but with such a crusty install your time has to be worth more than the cost of doing an upgrade to new hardware. Dry Caps suck, and failing components are a real pain to troubleshoot & Fix.