New Motherboard help

[BlackAdder]

Hi Guys, I've just bought a Asus M3A78-T mb and Phenom 2 940 cpu, which I should have by Wednesday. I have two Sata drives, one running Win. XP and the other Vista business, both are on my current Asus A8N-Sli Premium's Silicon Image Sata adapter. I unplug one to run the other as not to fudge either OS up and loose data. My new board as far as I can tell has a AHCI based Sata adapter..... can I expect to be able to plug either of my drives into this board and be up and running without having to reinstall Windows??? or new Sata drivers ??? Thanks for any help !

[Bender10]

I just swapped an XP drive into a new box, with new mb, cpu etc.. and had no problems...but I should have had problems....ymmv

Vista...I dunno

[NeoGen]

Because drivers and hardware components usually are totally different between motherboards, switching motherboards usually means a reinstall of windows. I've seen a good number of cases where if you switch the hard drive from one PC to another the result is Blue Screen at boot.

If, in the rare case that it boots up and asks for the new drivers, I still would recommend a reinstall, because windows always leaves leftovers and it's probably best to do a clean install and not have weird problems later.

[liuqyn]

at the very least, if you want to try it then uninstall all the drivers (MB, video, sound, network) before you move the drive over. though I agree with NeoGen that doing a fresh install is best.