Greetings!

Firstly many thanks for the information provided in this forum, it is a very valuable resource.

I hope I've placed this in the correct place, but I have been trying for a couple of weeks to upgrade the motherboard in a reasonably aged piece of electronic test equipment. Despite the age (about ten or twelve years), these units typically still fetch ~$3k+ on eBay, so they still have value despite being elderly in terms of motherboard hardware. The best the current board can manage is a 1GHz Pentium 3 with 512MB RAM. It's also a PATA only micro ATX board. I have already upgraded the PATA HDD to an SSD, giving some improvement, but it's still slow as you can imagine.

The prescribed route to fixing these units is to buy a replacement motherboard of the same type, so naturally that's not a favoured route, I'm looking to improve performance.

The board selections I have that will fit the case (there's no I/O shield, just cut outs in the aluminium chassis) are H110 and H170. I can perform new installs of XP by slipstreaming in the drivers here. However, there are drivers on the original build that I don't have the source media for, so I'm looking to do an XP repair install. When I do the repair install on the new board, with the same media that I used to do a successful fresh install, the drivers don't take.

I have been successful with an X99 repair install using the same method, but the board will take too much power from the unit's power supply.

If I attempt to introduce the drivers with Acronis Universal Restore instead of a slipstreamed install, the drivers, although made available with matching vendor and dev IDs, are showing up as not matching (this is all 32 bit).

So, is there a different approach I should be taking with a repair install? Or am I out of luck?

Many thanks for reading.

Thanks for your reply. Yes, a fresh install works as far as getting the OS going, the problem is that many of the .inf files for the hardware drivers (three custom PCI [not PCIe] cards) are missing: I could find .pnf files for the .sys files on the working system, but not all the .infs. add to that that there is some software protection going on too, so a clean install is almost certainly off the cards.

Of course, as soon as I asked for pointers online after two weeks of little progress, somehow I managed to get your AHCI drivers installed using Acronis Universal Restore against an existing working OS. I have no clue why it wouldn't work before, although it's probably operator error.

I also managed to find recover all the proprietary .infs inside a vendor supplied Ghost image on the recovery partition, I don't know why they are missing in the OS partition, or change to install-incompatible .pnfs.

I tried a few processors, a Celeron G3900 (2.8GHz 2C2T), Pentium G4500T (3GHz 2C2T) and an i3-6320 (3.9GHz 2C4T). The difference in startup time is startling compared to the old Pentium 3 @ 1GHz, down from a couple of minutes to 20s. I believe this could be improved further if I can get it to run in Windows 7, and get all the motherboard drivers properly working, but it'll almost certainly need to be a couple of in-place upgrades (W7 via Vista) as I've had no luck getting the app working with clean installs. The unit is pretty much designed to run one single-threaded application, so any benefit of multiple cores and hyperthreading is somewhat lost.

Anyway, thanks again for your help, I definitely wouldn't have got this far without this forum.