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Standing OS Hardware Upgrade OK?
Wasn't really sure what to title the thread, but here's what I'm doing, and where it's gone so far....
I took my antiquated Core 2 Quad Q6600 / 8GB DDR2 system and am giving it a pretty huge upgrade. Moving to a Sabertooth X79 with a i7 Hexa-core 3690 CPU, and 16GB DDR3 RAM.
Now, so far, I just swapped the hardware out, and then booted Windows. The attempt was to perform this without completely re-installing the OS. I know this wasn't possible with Win7 and prior, but found some optimistic threads about the process functioning fine with Win 8.1.
At first run, it spent about half an hour preparing devices for use. Then booted in on default video drivers, and restarted shortly after I logged in to apply changes.
After the second boot, it restarted again after I logged in, but I didn't see any purpose for it.
At the third startup, it loaded a bit lower than I expected after the logon screen, but got to the desktop and did some poking around. Enough to realize that the MB driver disk isn't readable at all, (not Win10 or hardware related, it's not "seen" on my other PC's either), then the system promptly restarted after about 5 minutes for no apparent reason again.
On the fourth startup, It didn't get to the logon screen, gave an interesting BSOD which was up too short for me to jot the 0x000... code from, and said it was restarting.
On the 5th, I got another BSOD for IRQL_LESS_THAN_blahblahblah, looked like an acpi driver file, but it's been 30 minutes, so my memory could be a bit off. It's one of the most common BSOD messages I see when working on PC's and is typically just a corrupt or incompatible driver file.
On the 5th, it went into recovery mode, said it needs to scan some stuff, and has been at "Diagnosing your PC" for roughly half an hour now.
So, experiment is kind of a fail, but curiosity kicked in, so I'm posting it here. Should I just force a restart and boot from the disk in repair mode, do a recovery install/upgrade, or wipe it all and start over again. (I know I will lose some data in this last process, but at least I made backups before upgrading so it's only a minor setback.)
I realize I'll probably have made a decision and moved with it before I get any real responses to this thread, but I'm really curious if any of you have done this before, or what your opinion is. :)