Upgrading Maximus mobo and CPU without Windows 10 reinstall

[vmounier]

Hi all,

I am upgrading my Maximus VIII Hero/6700K setup to a Maximus X Hero/8700K combo and do NOT want to reinstall Windows 10 and all programs. Windows 10 64-bits 1703 on a SSD.

Given the relative similarity of the motherboards, what are the odds of a simple swap, reboot and… voilà?

If the answer is "nevergonnahappen",*I also found a reference mentioning that setting these two registry values to 0 before swap and reboot would suffice, can anybody give me feedback on that?
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\pciide*

Finally is anybody familiar with Acronis Universal Restore in such a circumstance?*

Cheers,

Vince*

[Silent_Scone]

vmounier wrote:
Hi all,

I am upgrading my Maximus VIII Hero/6700K setup to a Maximus X Hero/8700K combo and do NOT want to reinstall Windows 10 and all programs. Windows 10 64-bits 1703 on a SSD.

Given the relative similarity of the motherboards, what are the odds of a simple swap, reboot and… voilà?

If the answer is "nevergonnahappen",*I also found a reference mentioning that setting these two registry values to 0 before swap and reboot would suffice, can anybody give me feedback on that?
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\pciide*

Finally is anybody familiar with Acronis Universal Restore in such a circumstance?*

Cheers,

Vince*

It may work, it may not. Depends on what devices including storage configuration are present on the install. I'd recommend reinstalling from scratch, personally. Saves any potential headaches down the line with conflicting wares that could have been avoided if you had reinstalled in the first place. It can be tricky to diagnose these things in retrospect.

As you're familiar with Acronis, you could always create a stock image for such occasions. Although even then, a reinstall can be needed when replacing the mainboard.

[vmounier]

Silent Scone wrote:
It may work, it may not. Depends on what devices including storage configuration are present on the install. I'd recommend reinstalling from scratch, personally. Saves any potential headaches down the line with conflicting wares that could have been avoided if you had reinstalled in the first place. It can be tricky to diagnose these things in retrospect.

As you're familiar with Acronis, you could always create a stock image for such occasions. Although even then, a reinstall can be needed when replacing the mainboard.

I appreciate the feedback! It's not the Windows re-install that I dread, but that of my flight sim which is buried under an avalanche of add-ons and customization. It would take days if not weeks. I am leaning towards giving Acronis a try as this still allows me to move the OS from its conventional SSD to a NVMe M.2 SSD since I now have two slots... Based on what they describe, I can feed the restore process the new drivers needed for mass storage and chipset and be done with it.

Which then brings up the question: I have found *.inf drivers on the install CD that pertain to mass storage, but for the chipset, all I have is an executable, which would not work for Acronis Universal Restore. Does anybody know where to get a simple driver file for the Maximus Hero X chipset?*

[vmounier]

Well in case anybody ever wanders here with the same question, I ended up successfully swapping both my motherboard and CPU without a Windows 10 reinstall.

Here are the main steps:

1. Made sure I was logging in to PC with Microsoft account rather than local, and that the license was reflected in my Microsoft account
2. Gathered storage controller and chipset drivers on a secondary internal SSD (from Maximus Hero X DVD, had to extract the chipset drivers as they were in *.exe format)
3. Created a full back-up of my C: drive hosting Windows in Acronis True Image (2018), put that in the same location as my drivers
4. Created Acronis bootable media CD
5. Took PC apart, installed new motherboard, CPU, PSU and cooler.
6. Booted from CD, recovered my C: backup to a new M.2 SSD (about 10 minutes)
7. Rebooted and performed Universal Restore from CD, where Acronis fetches new drivers in the location you specify along with Windows normal folder to adapt the recovered Win copy to new hardware.
8. Rebooted to the new Windows bootable partition.

Voilà. I did not even have to reactivate Windows!