hi, im just about to upgrade my micro-atx mobo to a intel d945gtp mobo. My Philips Freevents MT2400 pc did not come with any xp media center cd or recovery disk. However on the 1st start-up of the pc i was prompted to burn some type of cd (maybe recovery)?which i still have. What will happen when i install new mobo & switch on???
Please excuse my un-knowledge. All help will be much appreciated. Thanks

Hi and welcome to D-A-L

not a lot will happen, as I should imagine the CD you Burned will maybe have all the drivers etc for the original mobo and be for that set up only

ok, thankyou. So how do i go about Reinstalling my OS? (xp pro-media center).
Thanks again

Your OS may even be on a partition of the hard drive and the disc you burnt may only be a restore disc to set it back to factory setting.

did you have any booklets with the PC

have you upgraded the mobo?

The following information describes how another member was able to install a different motherboard without having to re-install Windows XP at all.

Before you swap out the current motherboard go to device manager and select the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller and select your current storage controller. Right click, select update driver and select install from a list or specific location. Click don't search I will choose the driver to install and select the standard dual channel IDE controller.

This will prevent the inaccessable boot device blue screen. I have done this multiple times on different platforms with no problems.

Also I found that booting the first time with the new motherboard is best done in the Safe mode where XP will install the drivers it needs and at the same time you can install the new motherboard drivers from its CD.

This saved me doing a repair or a reinstall of XP. My whole system came right up and worked great and very stable.

If you don't have the CD, you'll probably find that all of the XP installation files are already on your hard disk. Do a search for CAB files and see if it finds a couple of dozen (or more) in the same folder - if so, these are probably the Windows source files.

Note that I haven't tried the above procedure myself so I can't exactly endorse it .... but the member that gave that information certainly found it saved him a lot of time. Hope it helps