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Running Windows 8 on ASUS M3A?
I am giving serious thought to finally upgrading from Windows XP SP3 to
Windows 8. I have the ASUS M3A motherboard. First, does anyone know if I can upgrade straight from XP to 8? Or would I need to upgrade to Vista or Windows 7 first, then to Windows 8? Second, I have two 750 GB hard drives as well as a third 3 TB hard drive, all internal. When I installed the 3 TB drive last year, I had to run special software, Seagate Disk Wizard, in order to make the full 3 TB visible to XP. If I upgrade to Win8, will the install magically enable Win8 to see all the data on the 3 TB drive without taking any special precautions? Or will I need to do something first, like backing up all the data, reformatting the 3 TB drive, doing the install of Win8, then loading all the data back on the 3 TB drive? Are there any other gotchas that I should expect while upgrading to Win8? It's not that I particularly want or need Win8 but it feels like it's finally time to retire XP in favour of something from this decade. With support on XP dropping any day now - or is it already gone? - and Win8 being a lot more affordable than Win7, this feels like the right move to make. I'm just trying to anticipate any problems that might come along during the upgrade. -- Rhino |
#2
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Running Windows 8 on ASUS M3A?
Rhino wrote:
I am giving serious thought to finally upgrading from Windows XP SP3 to Windows 8. I have the ASUS M3A motherboard. First, does anyone know if I can upgrade straight from XP to 8? Or would I need to upgrade to Vista or Windows 7 first, then to Windows 8? Second, I have two 750 GB hard drives as well as a third 3 TB hard drive, all internal. When I installed the 3 TB drive last year, I had to run special software, Seagate Disk Wizard, in order to make the full 3 TB visible to XP. If I upgrade to Win8, will the install magically enable Win8 to see all the data on the 3 TB drive without taking any special precautions? Or will I need to do something first, like backing up all the data, reformatting the 3 TB drive, doing the install of Win8, then loading all the data back on the 3 TB drive? Are there any other gotchas that I should expect while upgrading to Win8? It's not that I particularly want or need Win8 but it feels like it's finally time to retire XP in favour of something from this decade. With support on XP dropping any day now - or is it already gone? - and Win8 being a lot more affordable than Win7, this feels like the right move to make. I'm just trying to anticipate any problems that might come along during the upgrade. -- Rhino You can try this thing. It's supposed to indicate what might not make a Windows 8 upgrade very happy. http://web.esd.microsoft.com/W8DL/WS...eAssistant.exe The Assistant also contains the upgrade tables. An upgrade from WinXP to Win8 is a "Clean Install", as applications won't be ported. This is partially to do with differences in folder structure. If you had Windows 7 on the disk, then it will do an actual "Upgrade Install", keeping the applications. You'll probably also have to do something about your AV, like disable it or uninstall it before doing the move. There are a couple tools for bringing back classic menus, and making Metro a little less conspicuous. This is not one of them. The only reason I'm mentioning this one, is I have it bookmarked. I didn't bookmark the other references when they came up. http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/features.html For your amusement, the topic of a free "Dummy" book came up yesterday. This is about 10MB or so. This might help if you choose not to "cheat" in terms of using the interface. https://marketing.dell.com/Global/Fi...ws-8-ebook.pdf A reason Windows 8 won't install on some older hardware, is a lack of hardware support for NX or XD bit. But AMD did NX first, meaning their hardware is more likely to work with Windows 8. My P4 processor on the other hand, is out of luck when it comes to Windows 8. Only my two Core2 systems are candidates for Windows 8. The NX/XD dependency didn't come up until the last preview version was released. The only surprising part, is they didn't seem to mention this was going to happen. The technical requirements might still state somewhere "1GHz processor", implying ancient hardware would work. But it didn't work out that way in the end. I hope the Assistant.exe above can catch that, before you've given your credit card details. Paul |
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Running Windows 8 on ASUS M3A?
I know this post was awhile back, but I wanted to say that if you haven't upgraded yet - and you have any ATA drives - don't upgrade. BTW - the upgrade website and the upgrade tool mentioned below will tell you that the M3A is completely compatible with Windows 8 when it is obviously not.
I've got two ATA DVD drives in my tower running off the M3a main board and while EVERY other device on the board survived the upgrade from win7 to win8 - it appears that the old drivers for the ATA IDE controller is not compatible with Windows 8, so none of my ATA drives are currently detected by windows. I spent about a hour online with Microsoft support and their best solution was to wait for a new driver. Getting in touch with the manufacturer has also been a challenge because to even get past their "contact us" page you have to have your serial number, date of purchase, place of purchase etc. . . and since I don't know where my original paperwork is now (I moved recently) and I've yet to feel like pulling apart my computer to see if the serial number is on the board itself, I don't have any idea what my serial number is - which means I cannot contact Asus and ask when they plan on supporting windows 8. On Thursday, November 22, 2012 3:50:04 PM UTC-6, Rhino wrote: I am giving serious thought to finally upgrading from Windows XP SP3 to Windows 8. I have the ASUS M3A motherboard. First, does anyone know if I can upgrade straight from XP to 8? Or would I need to upgrade to Vista or Windows 7 first, then to Windows 8? Second, I have two 750 GB hard drives as well as a third 3 TB hard drive, all internal. When I installed the 3 TB drive last year, I had to run special software, Seagate Disk Wizard, in order to make the full 3 TB visible to XP. If I upgrade to Win8, will the install magically enable Win8 to see all the data on the 3 TB drive without taking any special precautions? Or will I need to do something first, like backing up all the data, reformatting the 3 TB drive, doing the install of Win8, then loading all the data back on the 3 TB drive? Are there any other gotchas that I should expect while upgrading to Win8? It's not that I particularly want or need Win8 but it feels like it's finally time to retire XP in favour of something from this decade. With support on XP dropping any day now - or is it already gone? - and Win8 being a lot more affordable than Win7, this feels like the right move to make. I'm just trying to anticipate any problems that might come along during the upgrade. -- Rhino |
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