There's no need for formatting, but of course you will have to adjust BIOS on the new mobo which is only a few key presses.

BIOS > IDE AUTODETECT > press Y a few times

Can't help with SCSI tho - never used it.

If u want a good board get something with the Nvidia nforce2 chipset, much better for overclocking. Your ram will not let u overclock as u will not be able to raise the FSB on the athlon too much beyond what it is already without PC2700 ram, or PC3200 preferably.

On the new baords there isnt oo much that u have to set up HDD wise. Depending on what OS u use, u can just format when u install the new OS.

as above for the harddrive config in bios ^^

you will most likley have to reinstall your operating system, or if you have windows xp, boot of the xp cd, say install, say NO to formating, then it will say sometihng like "repair a instalation" ill find more detailed instructions if you wanna do this, as this saves having to reinstall all hardware etc


as to the nforce 2 vs kt400 debate, its down to personal choice, ive got a kt400 system to, and its been 100% rock solid which is most important to me, and ive still managed to overclock my xp1800 to 2ghz

you may find your 300w psu is not powerfull enough, the xp cpu's do eat more power, so I would recomend you look for a mid range - quality 400w psu, just dont buy a cheepo one. the qtec psu's from www.ebuyer.com seam to be good quality for thier price.

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ASUS A78NX Deluxe - Its the Shitz for Socket A boards my freind.. Oh u could wait for the new Athlon 64, which im drooling for

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quote:

Originally posted by MoonMan ASUS A78NX Deluxe - Its the Shitz for Socket A boards my freind.. Oh u could wait for the new Athlon 64, which im drooling for

personally i feal the ABIT or dfi-lan party are better than the ASUS, have you seen any A78NX running a 240mhz fsb?

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Beware of killer hamsters and the random running dogs.

quote:

Originally posted by DJ RozzeR What my question is will have to format my HDD , before i move everything into its new home ? I read that you might need to go into the BIOS and manually or Auto Detect HDD, Cyl Size etc ? Anyone help ?

i am 100% positive that you will get an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE BSOD upon reboot


the thing is, win2k and winxp autodetect your motherboard and set up ide channel drivers only once, during the initial installation. after that HAL (hardware abstraction layer) is hard to change and the only way i managed to do it is by doing an in-place upgrade, aka repair install - boot from the cd, select install, and then you'll have the option of either repairing or installing a new system - choose repairing.


_SOME_ of your settings WILL BE lost, in particular, ALL of the SP patches and hotfixes will be deleted. however, all of your programs, passwords, files, installations, shortcuts and what-not should remain intact, although, of course, you should back everything up twice. basically, i did this last week and i did lose all the SP patches on my wink2, including IE 6 (now it's the original 5.0 that came on the cd). however, some of my desktop settings remained the same, although not all of them (got reverted to the earlier color scheme i used...)

but before you do anything, backup everything, than backup the backup. you can never be too sure or too safe

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oh yeah, one more thing - before you swap mobos, go into the device manager and UNINSTALL everything you're not gonna use so that you don't have any problems or ghost devices or whatever. personally, i just move my HD to a new pc so i had to uninstall everything, but from my previous experiences i've never had any problems with ghost hardware.

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quote:

Originally posted by whiskers oh yeah, one more thing - before you swap mobos, go into the device manager and UNINSTALL everything you're not gonna use so that you don't have any problems or ghost devices or whatever. personally, i just move my HD to a new pc so i had to uninstall everything, but from my previous experiences i've never had any problems with ghost hardware.

just to add, remove all software installed with the hardware to, in the add-remove programs bit, i cant update the onboard sound on my mobo without uninstalling the sound software as well as the drivers.

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Beware of killer hamsters and the random running dogs.

quote:

Originally posted by MoonMan ASUS A78NX Deluxe - Its the Shitz for Socket A boards my freind.. Oh u could wait for the new Athlon 64, which im drooling for

nah, the Abit NF7-S 2.0 wipes the floor with it in every respect

i'm currently running it at 240fsb!!



the athlon64 is available now on certain sites too.. i think i saw some on www.overclockers.co.uk

thanks for the replies, if the worst comes to the worst ill just reistall xp, should take a few mins on a 2ghz,

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" You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us will-
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You shouldnt have any problems.

I got a similar mobo (Gigabyte KT400 jobby) and the XP2400, but in feb, and the cpu cost me £130. Cant believe its halved in price
Got a HiPower 420W PSU, does the job

My pc runs smooth as

Not bothered with ocing just yet, but when I do have a spare £200, I'll upgrade to a Abit NF7-S 2, XP2500 Barton and an Antec Trueblue PSU

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