Direct motherboard replacement, now will not boot to windows

[KompuKare]

Originally Posted by NYJimbo

Windows can be chipset or particular onboard component dependent on a swap, but not truly individual motherboard dependent.

If you swap out a mobo with the same exact mobo you might have to flash the bios if the replacement is lower and some devices are not seen or you might have to re-register windows because it doesnt like all the massive changes. But windows does not rely on having the original mobo it was installed on if all things are equal on the new motherboard build.

Yes. To clarify: the point being that 'windows has detected hardware changes and needs to re-activated' errors are not the same thing as 'windows could not load the correct drivers for this mobo and has helpfully BSOD'ed for you'.

The former is just Microsoft's copy protection paranoia, the later is mainly Windows pre-Vista being rather stupid with the way it handled HALs and drivers.

[welcome back btw.]

[codegreen]

What diagnostics did you run on the RAM and hard drive? If the motherboard was damaged by a power surge, the components connected to it may be as well.

[d3v]

As some of you alluded to, setting IDE mode in BIOS did the trick. Everything is now working just fine! Thanks for the help