Hello,
If you have kept up with my posts, I have built a system using some hardware from a few generations back. (Pentium 4)1.5Ghz 400MhZ 128Mb Ram Win98SE There are a few things I am not happy with, the first being the floppy drive is not reading anything. I don't think it worked from the start, since I attempted to make a boot disk when first installing windows, and it couldn't read the disk in the drive. Second, it does not play music CD's. The motherboard came as an opened box item, and I haven't heard too many good things about its brand. I suppose it may have been a prior builder's reject and have some kind of defect on it, or maybe it was damaged in shipping. Since it is difficult to obtain that same exact MOBO, I think I will resume with a new model, and I step up to 478 socket, since they are more readily available.
So, the problem is to install a new motherboard with drivers, without having to wipe the hard-drive. The question is, can I boot up the system after installing the MOBO and select a new hardware profile, for which Windows will search for all new drivers. By default it doesn't ask for anything, but I made a 2nd hardware profile for the sake of experimenting with the drivers, so that I would have one to rollback to, incase a driver would not work after reboot, and so at boot up windows asks which profile to use and there is an option to use a new profile as well.
I have read an article on this same subject in a PC magazine, a few years ago, but don't seem to have that article on-hand. It didn't have anything to do with profiles, it was even more rudimentary than that.