Hello,
If I change hardware on my PC, will MSFS stop working and need to be re-installed. I’m asking now as I plan on a new Motherboard, CPU and a larger M2 drive.
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Hi @SomberFlower634,
- How many drives (HDD and/or SSD) to you currently have on your existing motherboard?
- Please provide a list of the drives & which hosts the Windows OS & which hosts MSFS.
- Are you planning to connect any of these existing drives to the new motherboard? If so, which ones?
- What are you planning to install on the new, larger M2 Drive (e.g. new OS, MSFS…)?
Thanks!
Hello,
On my current motherboard I have 5 hard drives. My C drive is a Sata SSD 1TB. My second drive (F) residing in the main M2 slot is a 1 TB M2. My 3rd Drive (I) is a 500 GB M2 drive which resides in the second M2 slot on my motherboard. My 4th Drive (D) is a regular mechanical drive used for placing items in storage I seldom use. My last drive is an expansion USB drive, not directly connected to the motherboard and is used for backup.
The C drive hosts MSFS. The F Drive hosts the majority of the community folder addons hyperlinked. I plan on connecting all but the 1TB SSD Sata drive to the new mother board. I may drop the mechanical drive, not sure yet.
I plan on replacing the 1TB SSD Sata with a 2 TB M2. The new M2 will be an exact clone of the C Drive. (SSD Sata). So will have MSFS on it and in future MS2024. I can’t use the new 2TB M2 as my current motherboard doesn’t have enough M2 slots. On my new motherboard I will use all 3 M2 drives, possibly the sata for a spare backup, haven’t decided yet.
Pay attention to your mobo’s manual as too many drives can degrade performance
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Should work fine to a point.
I would recommend reinstalling windows. Some motherboards have no issues from to another, but to save a lot of possible grief, I find it easier just to bite the bullet and get a clean installation.
Some boards share the second M2 slot with the GPU’s PCIe lanes. Check the manual as has already been suggested. If you are grabbing a bigger M2 driver though seriously consider ditching the 500mb. Do you really need it ?
What is your license agreement on your windows?
If it is an OEM license, then you will be exceeding the limitation of what can be swapped out on that license. It used to be that you are allowed 4 points. Mobo is 3 points and the rest is 1 point each (CPU, GPU, HDD). I am not sure if memory is included. I have not read into this in a very long time, so again google check it.
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I won’t say never but this would be unusual on a modern PC, the 2nd PCIe slot would be first to get dropped.
It is not never or few, but indeed almost all, because of how the lanes are distributed. So no, it wont first sacrifice a PCI E slot, it will first reduce your GPU PCI E Slot from 16x down to 8x, as this frees up more lanes than giving up a PCI E 1x or 4x Slot and keeps them available. Imagine people adding a second or third m.2 SSD and suddenly the card in the third or fourth PCI E slot would stop working. No. Instead the first thing happening is the reduction of 16x down to 8x, freeing up 8 lanes basically.
Very interesting discussion. Currently I am using and Asus Rog Strix Z490. It’s about 3 and something years old now. I am still using Windows 10 Pro which I believe I purchased separately as I always put together my own systems. I’ll try to explain what happened and the reason for my question at the start of this thread.
As my MSFS C drive was becoming full, 68 GB remaining of 1 TB, I decided a 2 TB was needed, especially with the upcoming arrival of MS24. So I ordered the 2TB M2 and when it arrived I discovered that my C drive was actually a Sata and not an M2. This caused a problem as I only had 2 M2 slots on this board and both were filled, one the I drive, and the other the F Drive. In order to clone the new 2TB M2, I temporarily removed the F Drive and inserted the new 2TB M2 in it’s place. Samsung Magician said the clone was successful. I then removed the cloned 2TB and put the F Drive back in place. At this point all hardware was in it’s original places, and no software should have been changed.
I booted up ok and things looked and appeared normal. I tried various software apps, all worked. I tried Prosim on the I drive and it ran fine. Then the moment of shock, I ran MSFS and it threw an error, couple of blue boxes appeared stating this app cannot run and some other message that I forget. At the same time, the MSFS icon was removed from the taskbar and I could not find it anywhere on my PC, so I couldn’t try to run it again. Fortunately I had made a backup of my C Drive so I chose to restore it. This took 4 plus hours as my backup was on the USB E Expansion Drive. The restore worked though, thank heavens, and all was back to normal, the MS Icon was back in the Taskbar and MSFS ran with no apparent issues.
So I don’t know why MSFS did what it did and now I wonder if it will do the same when I have a new motherboard and M2 Drive. I know some of my software will require a key reset (Prosim for instance) but I don’t know how MSFS handles new hardware. So this was the reason for my original question.
In my experience, MSFS continued functionally working the same as it previously had when I switched my CPU and motherboard from Intel to AMD, but it worked even better (performance and smoothness) when I did a fresh install of Windows and MSFS a month or so later.
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If so then that’s new to me even if I do know it’s a rare event for a gpu to use more than 8 lanes (data mining & video processing excepted). Unfortunately I don’t have enough free SSD’s/PCI cards to test this.
Very smart to have a backup plan. I understand folks not doing it because they don’t want to invest the time to learn how, or maybe can’t afford the drive space. I’ve actually gotten pushback (“Bah, it’s a waste of time” 
)
Having backups, as you found out, is something you don’t know you need until you need it. It’s saved me a lot of headaches in the past.
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Is it? My 4080 runs on all 16 lanes when gaming, including MSFS. There are several reviews showing that you lose some performance when it switches to 8x, not a lot, but still. But obviously some lanes can be provided by the mainboard chipset, so it has to be checked for each mainboard individually what works and what does not. Seems my general statement was not true 100%, sorry for that
Nothing to be sorry for, different motherboard manufacturers all have their own way of splitting resources. And yes when gaming MSFS can and does allocate x16 but how full to capacity those lanes are is difficult to know. 100% usage in e.g. HWinfo relates to the gpu and will never tell the whole story on lane usage but IMO we’d be bottlenecked long, long before they are saturated
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The Lanes are allocated at bios level in the initial start up sequence. The load is spread across those lanes at the driver level.
HWinfo will show you how much of that lane bandwidth is being used.
Techspot has a page on data transfer speeds based on PCIe version and lanes used.
Use a USB to M.2 adapter and clone your C: drive to the new
2TB M.2.
Then, install it in your PC to replace the existing C: drive.
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Thanks, I’ll look into this with interest.
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Don’t just clone the c: drive. You have to clone the entire disk, including the hidden partitions.
If you’re changing the MB as well and using Win10\11, you might get a Windows not activated as the hardware has changed. This is easy to fix.
If you’re using Bit Locker, I’d strongly advise to de-crypt first!
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Agree to that but tbh I’ve never been a fan of cloning system drives as I prefer the knowledge of a nice shiny new OS and up to date apps, as with my bios any important settings I need to change are firmly implanted in my head.
As for bitlocker keys I always advise a hand written or printed (and multiply checked) copy kept in a secure place (not within the PC’s case), there’s nothing worse than finding your USB stick is corrupt or the key has been overwritten. If you are prone to changing them periodically then maintain a properly dated log.
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It all depends on the computer. For example, I’m swapping my AM4 setup with AM5 on my gaming computer. I plan to do a bare bones setup, with a clean Win11 install and BIOS setup, followed by a fresh sim install, and finally, adding all the other software from all the installers I have stored on a big thumb drive. It will be quite a process, but it’s worth doing with such a major hardware change.
On the other hand, I’m about to upgrade the 500GB drive on this laptop to a 1TB drive. I plan to clone it and then use MiniTool Partition Wizard to increase the size of my C: partition. The main difference is that I’m not changing any of the laptop’s hardware other than the drive.
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Great episode of Big Bang Theory: The boys remember that they’d mined a bunch of bitcoin now worth $5,0000 per coin. They thought they’d won the lottery.
Problem was the bitcoin was on a Batman thumb drive that Leonard lost years ago. Stuart had found it shortly after in his comic book store, erased it, and sold it to a Batman fan.
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