Upgrading motherboard, is it possible to swap without losing games on my hdd?

[btenn4]

Hi everyone,

 

Looking to make a small upgrade on a PC I built almost a year ago, this is what I currently have:

Intel i5 4460

8gb ram

MSI h81m-p33 motherboard

1tb hdd

120gb ssd

Windows 10

 

I have windows 10 installed on my ssd, and I have a few games that are all on my 1tb hdd. I recently picked up an Asus h97 motherboard on the same LGA 1150 chipset still compatible with all of my other components and looking to swap out my MSI board for it. I wanted to ask, can I swap out the motherboard without losing all of the games on my hdd? I am not familiar of how this works, if I plug my hdd with games to my motherboard will I be able to access them? If not, what should I do, should I go ahead and uninstall all of my games before swapping hardware? 

 

What about my ssd with windows 10? Should I remove all of the drivers through the control panel and then plug in directly to the new motherboard and try to load windows 10?

 

Any insight would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance!

[Lord Nicoll]

1 minute ago, btenn4 said:

Hi everyone,

 

Looking to make a small upgrade on a PC I built almost a year ago, this is what I currently have:

Intel i5 4460

8gb ram

MSI h81m-p33 motherboard

1tb hdd

120gb ssd

Windows 10

 

I have windows 10 installed on my ssd, and I have a few games that are all on my 1tb hdd. I recently picked up an Asus h97 motherboard on the same LGA 1150 chipset still compatible with all of my other components and looking to swap out my MSI board for it. I wanted to ask, can I swap out the motherboard without losing all of the games on my hdd? I am not familiar of how this works, if I plug my hdd with games to my motherboard will I be able to access them? If not, what should I do, should I go ahead and uninstall all of my games before swapping hardware? 

 

What about my ssd with windows 10? Should I remove all of the drivers through the control panel and then plug in directly to the new motherboard and try to load windows 10?

 

Any insight would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance!

It's the OS that might complain, you might need to reactivate it as the motherboard is what the OS ties too. The games should still be on the HDD, that won't change

[A Silver]

Everything should be fine. It is like plugging a USB into a different PC, you can still access all the files (and os in this case) but it may need to download a new driver.

[Valkyrie Lenneth]

its possible to upgrade ur motherboard but only if u preinstall the drivers before switching, else it will bsod while booting up, u need to have teh chipset drivers atleast installed to be able to boot ( windows install does install a default chipset driver so it can atleast boot and do default things, eventhough u need to install the mobo's chipset drivers after a standard install )

 

u can keep in ur old mobos drivers but u can also remove them

[ProjectBox153]

You can try to load the existing copy of Windows, but it doesn’t always work. I’d just do a clean install of Windows on your SSD. You’d still have all your games on your HDD. 

[btenn4]

Thank you so much for the replies everyone, I very much appreciate your help! I have Windows 10 ISO installed on a DVD-R and I have the access key the same one that I used to build this PC, can I just reuse this one? Do I try to uninstall Windows from my current computer and then boot Windows 10 through the DVD? 

[Lord Nicoll]

 

9 minutes ago, Valkyrie Lenneth said:

its possible to upgrade ur motherboard but only if u preinstall the drivers before switching, else it will bsod while booting up, u need to have teh chipset drivers atleast installed to be able to boot ( windows install does install a default chipset driver so it can atleast boot and do default things, eventhough u need to install the mobo's chipset drivers after a standard install )

 

u can keep in ur old mobos drivers but u can also remove them

Naw windows will auto install all the required drivers (that whats the "windows is setting up" screen is for, however yeah it can sometimes fuck up or kill the install, Windows is very suicidal.

[Valkyrie Lenneth]

2 minutes ago, Lord Nicoll said:

 

Naw windows will auto install all the required drivers (that whats the "windows is setting up" screen is for, however yeah it can sometimes fuck up or kill the install, Windows is very suicidal.

those drivers wont work on all boards trust me, did many mobo swaps while remaining windows like 50% of them work out of the bat and 50% of them crash on startup

[Lord Nicoll]

Just now, Valkyrie Lenneth said:

those drivers wont work on all boards trust me, did many mobo swaps while remaining windows like 50% of them work out of the bat and 50% of them crash on startup

Windows basic drivers work on all devices, but some things not so much, I had USB 3 being limited to USB 2 until I installed the asmedia controller (HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN) driver but it was enough to get into the OS. Safe mode uses only windows drivers and it's fine.

[Valkyrie Lenneth]

2 minutes ago, Lord Nicoll said:

Windows basic drivers work on all devices, but some things not so much, I had USB 3 being limited to USB 2 until I installed the asmedia controller (HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN) driver but it was enough to get into the OS. Safe mode uses only windows drivers and it's fine.

try booting a os installed on amd and switch to an intel platform for example

 

ur chances of booting it will be 0 unless u preinstall stuff ( bsod at bootup )

 

trust me on this one it comes from experience... the basic windows drivers arent compatible with all hardware swaps and alot of mobos actually screw it anyway doesnt really matter either its just a 50/50 chance it might not work

 

and with 50/50 i mean not even beeing able to get into window > bsod at the startup flag for example

[AvocadosGuac]

17 minutes ago, Jamiec1130 said:

You can try to load the existing copy of Windows, but it doesn’t always work. I’d just do a clean install of Windows on your SSD. You’d still have all your games on your HDD. 

Windows 10 is ALOT better with this kind of thing.

 

Windows 7 almost never boots with different mobo's installed. And im not sure about 8

[Lord Nicoll]

4 minutes ago, Valkyrie Lenneth said:

try booting a os installed on amd and switch to an intel platform for example

 

ur chances of booting it will be 0 unless u preinstall stuff ( bsod at bootup )

 

trust me on this one it comes from experience... the basic windows drivers arent compatible with all hardware swaps and alot of mobos actually screw it anyway doesnt really matter either its just a 50/50 chance it might not work

 

and with 50/50 i mean not even beeing able to get into window > bsod at the startup flag for example

I've had windows irreparably damage itself from BSODing while doing the stupid auto repair thing. AMD to Intel is a different kettle of fish really, you would have some apps that compiled themselves for AMD suddenly being thrown into an Intel system and not the fuck knowing what to do. H81 to H 97 should work, the only problem would be from Haswel on the newer haswel chipsets used to fuck up, although it's all good now. 

[ProjectBox153]

8 minutes ago, Jrock said:

Windows 10 is ALOT better with this kind of thing.

 

Windows 7 almost never boots with different mobo's installed. And im not sure about 8

Windows 10 is better, but I have a copy of Windows 7 that’s been from a P4 to Athlon 64X2 to i5 5200u to everything in between. 

[AvocadosGuac]

10 hours ago, Jamiec1130 said:

Windows 10 is better, but I have a copy of Windows 7 that’s been from a P4 to Athlon 64X2 to i5 5200u to everything in between. 

Ur copy is broken

 

I moved from a z97 chipset to another z97 board on win 7 and it wouldnt get past the boot screen. It would just freeze... 

[ProjectBox153]

12 hours ago, Jrock said:

Ur copy is broken

 

I moved from a z97 chipset to another z97 board on win 7 and it wouldnt get past the boot screen. It would just freeze... 

Sometimes it does that to me on VERY specific systems. Other times it’s been the only copy of Windows that I’ve managed to get to boot on a system. I’m booting it from a USB drive, if the bus makes a difference. 

[btenn4]

I swapped motherboards yesterday and am very happy to say that everything works perfectly, no issues whatsoever. I did not need to reinstall Windows and I did not lose any applications or games or anything else on any of my drives. Everything went smoothly, honestly did not expect it to work out so easy. All I did was uninstall the drivers from my old motherboard on the control panel and then I uninstalled all of the drivers under device manager and swapped out hardware, booted directly to the desktop in Windows 10 and reinstalled new drivers and everything was good to go.

 

Thank you all for replying and for guiding me, am very grateful for the help and I learned something new by going through this process.