Do I have to reformat to do a Motherboard swap?

[KRAMER]

It's looking like I'm going to have to replace my current Abit KA7 & 800 Athlon with something else, but that's another story. What I'm wondering is if I were to remove the old mb, processor and memory and replace it with new stuff, do I have to reformat my hard drive to be successful? I have tons of stuff on it and would really like to avoid the reformat if possible. I'm running Win98 SE and have an SB Live, Geforce ddr 4x agp, modem etc. The new board will likely be something with the KT266A chipset with an Athlon XP. Thanks for your help.

[bigparsnip]

I have done this before with windows 98, but onece I had the new motherboard in and rebooted, it all started to go wrong. Windows did its usual thing of finding hundeds of pieces of new hardware, and had to reboot about 10 times to get all of the new drivers on the system (but I don't thnk it replaced all of the drivers for the system hardware, whcih is where I think my problems came from). After this windows did work but it was a lot less stable than with my previous motherboard, and would freequently hang or crash.

I think there is probably an answere to your qestion in there somewhere, but I think your best bet would be to try and swap the motherboard out before formatting, because if it doesn't work and you then have to format, it wont have cost you anythiign and will only take an extra half hour or so to do.

[ukulele]

I have done this a few times and there can be problems with motherboard drivers but I have done it successfully more then once. If you have the drive space and kept copies of the programs you use the easiest way to do it without problems is to switch out the parts then reinstall windows in a new directory on your old drive. Next, load the new motherboard drivers and device drivers, and then reinstall the software you wish to keep. Finally you can move all your data files that you wish to keep into thier respective directories in the newly setup directory. When you are sure you have everything back to the way it was, delete the old directories if you want to free up the drive space again. Another easy alternative is to buy a second drive, format and load it, then move in the old data. It sounds complicated but actually it is simpler then it at first appears. You will amazed at how much dead weight you left behind and the improved performance a clean reinstall will accomplish.