General User Tips

Usually, when a hard drive is moved to a new system, all devices should be set to 'standard' devices : ie- Standard IDE, VGA, etc.  With standard devices compatible with anything, the operating system can be moved to new hardware, and Windows will boot on the new system without encountering a BSOD.  Once the system is bootable, Windows can operate to detect and install the appropriate optimized drivers.

Safe Mode:  If your computer will not start, you may be able to start it in safe mode. In safe mode, Windows uses default settings (VGA monitor, Microsoft mouse driver, no network connections, and the minimum device drivers required to start Windows).

When moving an operating system from an old hard drive to a new hard drive, there are several options:

• Install the old HD as the boot disk (master, primary channel) in the new system.  Make all system changes.  After all is working well, install the new hard drive on the secondary channel, then Image the old HD to the new HD.  Remove the old HD and move the new HD to master position on the primary channel.
• In the old HD, prepare the OS for hardware change (e.g. delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE enum, etc.).  Move the old HDD to IDE2, and install the new HDD on IDE1.  Boot with a floppy and run DriveImage or Ghost.  Copy the old partition(s) to the new drive. Remove the Image floppy, and reboot.  Upon reboot, Windows detects the hardware components.
• Or, as a safety, Image the old HD to the new HD, remove the old HD, and make all changes to the new HD.  If anything goes wrong, you'll still have everything on the old HD.

After system build, to test, boot from a floppy.  This will give you a chance to make sure everything is at least basically working before getting involved with the existing OS and hard drive.

If you don’t remove your old hardware drivers when changing motherboards or any other hardware, Windows still has the drivers for the old hardware loading up.  If you want to see this, start Windows in Safe Mode and open Device Manager; look under each item to see references to old hardware no longer installed.

You'll need to reinstall Windows if you want SSE to be utilized (according to AMD).  SSE is new to the AMD CPUs; only XP CPUs have it.