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My Gigabyte motherboard shorted and fried my Ivy Bridge CPU. I have repurchased a new motherboard (Asus H170) and CPU (Skylake). Just like previous users on this site (1 and 2*), I want to reuse my previous boot drive without having to reinstall everything form scratch (SSD with Windows 7 Pro 64bit installed). When I first got the drive a few years ago, I installed the motherboard-vendor-specific drivers from Gigabyte (for USB 3.0, the chipset, audio etc.). If I hook this to my new H170 Asus motherboard, I'm concerned that these old Gigabyte drivers will load. I will try to reach safemode with the hope that the drivers won't be loaded, so that I can uninstall them:

Does Windows 7 safemode disable vendor-specific chipset, USB, and audio drivers?

If I accidentally boot without reaching safemode, how likely are catastrophic failures (data loss on the SSD, damage to any hardware components) due to incorrect drivers (i.e., Gigabyte instead of Asus) being initialized?

*The questions here differ from the related threads in that I'm asking not whether the system will boot after the change (in regular mode), but rather what happens in safe mode and whether the regular boot mode can result in catastrophic failures.

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Wuschelbeutel Kartoffelhuhn
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  • W7 is much more friendly when it comes to booting with new hardware than it was for XP, but it can still cause problems. It should boot into safe mode which load minimal drivers. Unfortunately it may invalidate the windows activation due to new motherboard. All you can do is try regular boot and if it fails you will need to reinstall W7. – Moab Oct 06 '15 at 23:42
  • "All you can do is try regular boot" - why not safe mode first to check if I can uninstall the drivers without them loading first? I'll have to call Microsoft for the reactivation in either mode, right? – Wuschelbeutel Kartoffelhuhn Oct 07 '15 at 01:04
  • Your best bet and the easiest method is to backup your data and do a fresh install. There are simply too many hardware-specific bits of code that can slowly corrupt your system if accessed incorrectly. Also, if there is a warranty on the new hardware, old incompatible data made for another product will void it. – Dooley_labs Oct 07 '15 at 02:06
  • @WuschelbeutelKartoffelhuhn that was in case Safe mode did not help you solve the issue. – Moab Oct 07 '15 at 15:17

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It ended up booting from the old drive (I had to put the drive into the first SATA port on the motherboard: SATA0). In safe mode, the system booted and loaded the Desktop without problems. In regular mode, the system booted, but froze after a few seconds. I resolved this by uninstalling old audio and USB drivers in safe mode.

Windows safe mode does in fact not load vendor-specific drivers and catastrophic failures are unlikely (at least immediately).

Wuschelbeutel Kartoffelhuhn
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