DescentBB

I'm going to be doing some upgrading and rebuilding of three systems and need some help in a couple areas.

Upgrading my main rig is a no-brainer. Plug in new 3200+ CPU and Ram. Piece-a-cake.

Going to build a new rig for my GF to replace her ancient 566 Celeron. The base will be a Soyo Dragon Plus KT600 with the 2600+ CPU and PC2700 I take out of my main rig. I want to give her the backup HDD from my main rig that ran on an nForce2 mobo. I want to wipe that drive, install WinXP Home on it and clone her HDD to it. Her old HDD ran Win98SE with Intel drivers and is not partitioned. How do I insure I've deleted the chipset drivers and how do I set up that drive and clone it? I ask because a while back I went from a VIA to an nForce2 board on my main rig and made the HDD unusable.

Then, I'm going to rebuild my second rig. It will be using an Asus A7V333 mobo with a 1700+ CPU and PC2100 RAM. The HDD will be the same, but I'm switching from an nForce2 board to a VIA333. This HDD has been running Win98SE, but I want to upgrade it to WinXP Home. Oh, it is partitioned.

If someone want to sort out this can of worms it will be greatly appreciated.

Changing MB's, format HD. If nothing is needed on that drive, just format it. It's the best thing to do.

I'll second that. Otherwise it's a big mess.

Ideal opportunity to ditch Win98. Really, it does suck something fierce!

You can migrate a 2K or XP install across disks no problem, and you can even switch motherboards without issue provided that on the final boot, you remove ALL motherboard devices from the device manager (Uninstall them), along with ALL hardware device drivers.

That way, when Windows detects a new MB, it can look for new drivers, and won;t have the legacy ones hanging around.

Set everything up with the reformated drive, win xp from your old system. then grab her old drive add it as a slave to the primary channel., the 98 drive will show up as another hardrive on the system. Grab all the files you need and save them in her XP documents folder. Now format the old 98SE drive if it can be used on the new system for storage .. DONE