Pentium to AMD
 

I have an old 300mhz P2 and would like to change the motherboard and processor to an AMD 1.3ghz. Will everything work OK if I switch out the mobo and processor but leave the same old hard drive with all my data in it?

No - the only time you can do that is if the diskcontroller is the same, and it isent in this case.

You would get better preformance to, when you reinstall

So what else do I need to buy?

Interesting....I went from and old dell motherboard with a pentium 233 (or some shit) to a custom built pc with an MSI motherboard and AMD athlonXP 1900 processor. I can still plug in my old hard drive and boot to windows 98 without any loss of data.

By the way, the new machine is running windows XP pro

that souldent be possible -

I would just make sure your harddisk is a 7200 Rpm and not a 5400 Rpm. And be sure to have enough Ram (min. 256 mb)

Why would the hard drive controller make any difference?
I thought all that would be taken care of in the motherboard BIOS?

It is...I've built several machines this year and some people just want to upgrade a little at a time.

It isent
When the Bios makes a API call from the software, if needs to be the same adress, and that almost only happend when its the same diskcontroller

dont get me wrong, im not telling you that you are lying :thumbsup - just said it shouldent work thats all

I had to format and reinstall everything on my harddrives when i changed from AMD to Intel P4, I think it was some problems with the VIA-chip that AMD is using...

i have a hard drive that i used since 99 running on windows 98. i've gone from a k6-2, to a p3 and now to an xp 1600 and that hard drive still runs just as good as the first day i had it. i have it running fat32 on xp pro now and my main hard drive, that windows is on, running ntfs.

normally when you install a new mobo and processor you need to format the hard drive for it to work, unless if you just fdisk it, it might work.

Just plug the mother fucker in.... and it will work... It's really No big deal...Just have the CD that comes with the new mother board. Don't worry about the dam Bios or anything else.

Don't do this... you don't have 2 do this... Believe me...

It doesn't make any Difference.... Beleive me I've done 100's and you DO NOT HAVE 2 reformat or fdisk the harddrive. Fuck I just did it on 1 of mine last week.

Now you know what your talking about.

your wrong.. PERIOD

Thanks jimmyf :thumbsup

:glugglug I've got a cold one for ya!

DONT FDISK IT !!! you will lose date
The reason i said ge should reformat is that he proberly ran on some Fat16 partition on the old system, and it would be better to get it up on a NTFS 5 or at least a Fat32 to handle bigger blocksize = Better I/O = Low Latenzy

@jimmyf : about being wrong, nope , get your API layer straight - I do this for a living :thumbsup (and i Aint dead yet)

Ok here's the deal:

1st all new harddrives are plug and play. You can swap your old hardrive to your new computer no problem. All harddrives use an ide cable so make sure you have the #1 usually the red wire in the ide (gray) cable, with the #1 pin on your motherboard. Most new ide cables are keyed so they only go on one way. Also you should go into the system bios and input the exact sectors, cylinders,etc the harddrive has. Your bios might not be setup to auto configure your harddrive. Also you don't need 256mb of memory for a new harddrive even though 256mb is like 80$ now why not buy it. Buy a barebones sytem off ebay and throw your harddrive in it. I bought one 4 years ago it came with :
motherboard,case,300w powersupply,agp 3d ati rage graphics card for only $199. I had no problems at all with it.

Pornisgood is almost right. But you could have problems if you got an old 80MB hard drive or something like that. (I still got one of these :) ) Or you could have a problem if your old hard drive is a SCSI hard drive. But most PCs have IDE...

If the connector is the same than it should work...