Will my backup work if I replace my motherboard?
Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom
here for Ask Leocom.
Here's the question.
I would like to upgrade my motherboard to the latest processor.
I did. A full backup of my C drive. Would
it reinstall with all my current programs to the new system.
The best I can say is maybe.
In fact, I'll even go so far as to say probably.
But I'll also point out that you may not necessarily need the backup at all.
Good that you have it.
You might need it, but you might not need
it for the scenario that you're just talking about.
When you're replacing the motherboard,
you're essentially changing the foundation of your computer.
The fundamental nature of your computer, the CPU, a lot of the circuitry that goes
along with it, some of the builtin circuits,
like audio video now are built into motherboards and such.
So what's happening is that there's a lot of stuff that's changing now.
The image of your system that is either
on your backup or for that matter, just on the hard drive that I'm presuming
you did not change, it's configured for a different motherboard.
It has drivers for that hardware, that audio device, that CPU, that circuitry.
When you replace the motherboard and you
suddenly reboot and bring up Windows using that motherboard,
windows then goes through kind of a culture shock, if you will,
that says, oh crap, everything's changed, or all this stuff has changed.
It will try really, really hard to accommodate all of the changes.
Windows, especially in more recent
versions, has become actually fairly resilient to change.
So there's a very good chance that it will say, oh, it's this audio device now
and not that audio device and this CPU, or not that CPU, those kinds of things.
It will make a lot of those changes transparently under the hood.
And the chances are it'll probably, probably work.
I keep saying probably because honestly,
it really depends on just how different your motherboard is from the original.
The more different it is, the higher the likelihood of things not
working or at least not being stable after the fact.
So my recommendation is that you do this.
You don't need your backup.
You go ahead and replace your motherboard,
plug in the hard drive, reboot the machine and see what happens.
If it doesn't boot, well, then you know that something has to happen.
If it does boot, my recommendation is that you use it for a while.
You exercise the programs you have
installed, you exercise the hardware that's attached.
And I say that because that exercise is hopefully going to expose any other issues
that may have cropped up from changing the motherboard.
It's possible that something could be
detected and repaired on the spot by Windows, or it could be one of those
things where Windows suddenly says, hey, something changed.
I can't deal with it. Help.
The bottom line is that playing with it is
really the only way you'll get a good answer.
Now you've got a backup to begin with.
That's fantastic.
If you didn't have a backup before
replacing your motherboard, take a backup image,
a full image of the hard disk before you replace the motherboard.
That's a safety net.
If things go wrong, if things go horribly
wrong, you'll be able to use that for a couple of different reasons.
Now, of course, if your hard disk won't
boot because Windows is so different and your backup has an image of the hard
disk, the backup isn't going to boot either.
You could restore the backup all you want, but you're just restoring what was already
on the hard disk that you know didn't work.
The backup becomes useful in a couple of other scenarios.
If the new motherboard causes your system to not work, not boot, not work properly,
whatever, then you've got a couple of different approaches to take.
One is to repair windows.
You can do that from Windows installation media, which you can download,
and hopefully that will basically run Windows through most of its setup process.
That will cause it to redecog all of the hardware on your system
and reconfigure itself for all of the changes.
That actually is probably a pretty good solution.
It will probably work.
The problem, of course, is that depending on the choices you make
during that process, you may lose all of your installed programs and your data.
It will be kind of sort of like installing Windows from scratch.
In that case, you'll need to reinstall
your software and recover your data, presumably from the backup that you took.
The other approach, the worst case approach,
the if all else fails approach, is in fact to reinstall Windows from scratch.
If things are so badly broken that you
can't do a repair that you can't just boot the thing and work.
The thing to do then is to do a complete fresh reinstall of Windows.
And that by definition a should configure
itself for your new hardware, but then also will require that you
reinstall your applications, recovery data from your backup,
or wherever else is convenient, and then you should be able to move on.
But in all honesty, these days,
giving it a try is the first step that I would take because I think there's a very
high likelihood that it will probably just work.
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I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.