[clue-tech] upgrade question

[David Anselmi]

skipworthy wrote:
[...quote about driver incompatibilities switching motherboards out from 
under Win2k]

> Actually, I have done this very thing many times with *very few* issues 
> at all: Though I agree that it may not be a good idea ( in fact I 
> wouldn't recommend ti for a whole list of reasons), and it probably 
> won't be real stable,  but it has a 99% chance of success: and if the 
> machine will get past POST, and Win2k will boot and recognize the drive, 
> you're more or less home free. Again, I agree that its better to get the 
> newer drives going, but even a 'chipset specific' driver is unlikely to 
> cause a stop error, and its even less likely that a 'registry hack' will 
> make that much difference.

Really?  My experience is the opposite.  Do you have any details on how 
you've done this successfully?  Perhaps with older machines it didn't 
matter as much (and my experience is always with built-in IDE 
controllers from the past 2-3 years).

I've moved drives successfully between K7SEM boards (even when one was 
"generic" and one branded ECS) but never from a K7SEM to anoter vendor's 
board: move drive to new MB, stop 0x7B, unless the MB is the same model. 
   I can give a demo any time we can get together.

The box does POST fine, the BIOS finds the boot loader, ntldr finds 
Windows.  But then when the NT kernel tries to load the IDE controller 
driver--stop.  Here's the description of the problem:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/2000/professional/reskit/en-us/part7/proch33.mspx

although a more concise description (but for Win XP) is here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;316401

> (Since the IDE standard has been around as long as it has, and 
> controllers are now integrated with the drives and are designed for this 
> , there are not many differences that will be consequential on that 
> level.

That's what I thought the first time I tried it.  Linux is like this: 
the IDE driver can handle any IDE disk/controller but the chipset 
drivers (and Linux does have them, e.g., via82cxxx) take advantage of 
other features (like DMA, perhaps).  But Windows seems to care very much.

Dave