I have a 5 year old Dell desktop that I use as a home server. Monday morning the machine failed to boot showing non-English text and bizarre patterns on the monitor. I assumed this would be a bad memory stick, but it turned out to be a failed capacitor on the motherboard. There were 2 other swollen caps so this wasn't going to be a quick repair.

I have another 5 year old Dell that I decided to use as a replacement for the server. It's a different model with a different motherboard.

I moved the old server's hard drive to this machine, powered it up and hoped Windows XP would sort out the hardware changes. Nope, I got a blue screen.

I used Acronis with Universal Restore to restore a 3 day old backup to the drive. I powered it up, Windows went through a flurry of 'Found new hardware' activity and loaded drivers for everything but the NIC and the on-board audio. I got these from Dell's website and in under an hour had the new server up and running.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that even with the motherboard change, XP was still activated.

CC

This feature is awesome. It saved me from a system reinstall when I switched from SATA AHCI to SATA RAID on my P5WDH Deluxe.

I just had to reinstall drivers like you did.

TrueImage rocks