Upgrading mainboard - Windows XP

I finally decided that my old MSI K8T800-Neo FSR mainboard, and with it my AMD Athlon 64 3200+ needed to be replaced, and have purchased a new mainboard, Athlon Quad Phenom PIB, and 4gb of Mushkin ddr2. My current system simply doesn't meet the hardware requirements of two of my college courses, and the upgrade should allow me to consider upgrading to Vista down the road.

I have been looking around on the internet for a safe, vetted procedure to install the new mainboard without having to completely reinstall windows - I do not have access to a Windows XP SP3 disc of any sort, and my CD burner is dead so even if I could find my sp2 disc, I wouldn't be able to slipstream a new one. Nor do I have access to the installation CDs for my programs at the moment.

I have found several threads on the net that point at using SYSPREP before installing the new mainboard, but I would prefer to have detailed instructions. I have already backed up all of the files I want to keep just in case I do have to reinstall everyhing, but the discs necessary to do that are not accessible right now.

Another problem I noticed is that the new MB only has one IDE channel (and 5 SATA), so I had to buy a new SATA DVD burner since I have two IDE HDD that work just fine. I should probably install the SATA burner first and get it's drivers installed before running SYSPREP right?

 

Ok, one last thing I forgot... The mainboard only has one slot for a PS/2 connector (keyboard or mouse) and both my keyboard and mouse are USB... Will I be able to use my USB keyboard to enter the BIOS?

 

Ok, I've got the system up and running... some.

Had to run a repair install, and during that the install program could not find the file dpnet.dll to copy. Now the computer is rebooting itself after a few minutes of up time if I don't run in Safe Mode... though SM hasn't crashed once yet. (I'm in SM w/ networking right now.)

What kind of information do I need to post to get help stabilizing my system, and how do I get it to post here?

Also, when I installed the graphics drivers for the onboard GPU (downloaded directly from NVidia's website), I could only display in 4-bit 640x480 resolution... But using the default driver XP installed after I uninstalled the Nvidia one works fine. Any thoughts on how I can make full use of the onboard gpu? I've already installed all of the drivers that came with the mainboard.

And apparently the computer isn't detecting the onboard sound either.

 

Yep. Some of the old VIA drivers got left on the computer before the swap (thought I'd gotten them all, nasty little buggers.)

I've had a friend back up the hard drive, and am in the process of doing a clean install of Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit. Next time.. Going to get myself into the habit of doing clean installs on a yearly basis... soon as I can Slipstream an install disc that will have all the drivers on it I need and whatnot.