Motherboard upgrade complete…

…and it only took me 5 hours.

Prologue

The upgrade was from a ECS HT 2000 (AMD690GM-M2) to a ASUS A8N-SLI.

The ECS was okay, however:

1. It had a fairly standard Phoenix BIOS which did the job well, but didn’t have all the ASUS extras (AI N.O.S comes to mind) and the BIOS layout which I missed sorely from my broken-down A8V-E Deluxe.
2. The onboard sound was more or less broken, leading to a purchase of a Soundblaster LIVE value.

I had tried getting a A8N-SLI before, after my A8V-E died of natural wear and tear, however the one I got off of eBay was a lemon; DIMM slots were faulty, PCI-E slots were faulty, 1 PCI slot faulty. We (as in my Dad and I) never got a refund as the seller (some guy in Hong Kong) changed his address, so the damned board bounced back and is now sitting in a box.

The moral? Never buy stuff from Lau Po Man, living in Tsui Ping Est, Hong Kong or anything of value from China, no matter how cheap. So, I got a ECS HT 2000 at a cheap price (not from China) and it served me well… until the PCI-E slot became faulty.

The slot randomly shorted out my 8600GT (read: broken), so I had to take my Dad’s overclocked 8600GT (he has a 9600GT now, envy him).  It would only detect the card if you placed it in a very precise position inside the slot, this was achieved by gently nudging one corner of the card upwards very slightly; any vibration or knock to the chassis would cause the slot to fail at boot time. Naturally, this became infuriating when I needed the machine for productivity.

Never buy stuff from Lau Po Man, living in Tsui Ping Est, Hong Kong

Epilogue

I’ve finished installing and activating Windows 7 Ultimate Retail onto my Windows designated disk as I feared it would require a reinstall, what with not being a portable, flexible operating system. OpenSuSE should have no problems when it boots up tomorrow; it should simply detect the new board and mount my system and home disks as I chose the wise option of mounting via volume/disk labels.

On a similar note, you should always tell YaST, fstab (or however your distro handles mounting) to mount via disk/volume label as the default of ‘by-id’ or ‘by-path’ will screw up your OS should you change your motherboard as the bus ids and device paths will have changed, unless you swap out with the exact same motherboard (and revision) with the same cabling.