Hi blokes and birds...

This question may have been asked before but the search didn't point to anything specific.

Does it make (technical) sense to upgrade mobo and CPU without re-installing the whole nine yards?
I was thinking of going quad with the Q6600 and the Intel BadAxe 2. My current specs are in the sig. I've got so much stuff installed on my rig that I'm really dreading a complete reinstall from scratch.

I've already upgraded once an old mobo and SSE2 processor to Core 2 duo and ASrock conroe. To my great surprise OSX would still boot from the old HD without a glitch, apart of course from the mobo components that needed further patching. Back then I thought it would be better to redo the whole thing as there wasn't much software installed yet anyway. Now it looks a bit different. It will probably take me at least a week to get everything back to status quo - and then not even guaranteed as some apps are quite tricky to install.

Anyway, is this a good idea in general or could the system become 'weird' if kept as is, even though it's not perceivable in the beginning? Doesn't OSX always install 'everything' even if the hardware is not even present?

cheers for any hint
sol

First of all, even though I know there are other newer compatible boards out there, I don't think you'll find anything better for OSX right now than the Bad Axe 2. I have a few of these systems and I almost can't make them 'not work' with just about any installer that is for intel processors. And what's more important is the system's stability after installation. It really does rival my Mac Pro in a lot of ways. I've had JaS (several versions), uphuck, kalyway, and XxX all running with no hassles. If you're planning on installing windows (which I still use heavily) on a partition, make sure you load the SATA and AHCI drivers that come with the board. That way, you can set your bios to AHCI one time and get the best out of your SATA drives for both OS's.

What software are you using that you refer to as 'tricky' to install. I have retail versions of FCS2 and Adobe CS3 Production Premium from my Mac Pro and they all install and register perfectly. Although JaS works perfectly, right now I think Kalyway and XxX offer more out of the box. Kalyway as a patch (v2) that takes care of a couple of bugs in the PPF1 version.

If you're using the same gfx card, you could probably get away with using your same system disk. OSX will pick up the major changes in the motherboard, chipset and processor upon booting up. But as I'm sure you know, the best thing for a new system is to install from scratch. What you could do to make this less painful is to make an image of your system disk with the new hardware installed. You can use either SuperDuper or CopyCatX. Then you can go ahead and begin a new install, at your own pace, making an image of wherever you leave off. If you have any work that needs to be done, just re-install the old image. On my system, it only takes about 15 minutes to restore the whole disk. Then when you're finished, you can restore the partial new image and continue installing software and tweaking until you're done.

Cheers mate. Nice one! I didn't even think of the disk image and restore. I'll give it a shot.
I always kept another OSX on a second HD for testing new releases, patches, untested apps etc.

The tricky part is that I've got a few apps that need some further tweaking prior to install, like Maya and a few VST plugins. I don't remember anymore which ones exactly and how I did it. I was really bad about all this, I should have documented every step like I usually do in Linux.
I also have a lot of preference settings for defaults, short cuts etc in many apps which I first have to check how to make a backup, if possible at all.
Then I've got Parallels with Ubuntu which is also heavily tweaked but I think I can just make a backup of the entire folder and copy it to the new install (I hope...)

I've got about 100GB of apps and plugins...

Just one last question - is there a way to list everything you have ever installed in OSX, including codecs, plugins, drivers, stuff that just sits in the background somewhere etc?
The application and receipts folders give you somewhat of a picture but definitely not everything I have on my machine.

thanks