Mainboard failed, trying to save system

Last week I failed the MSI mainboard in my Pentium 4 computer. Although I have a fairly recent backup, I want to avoid a complete reinstall of my Windows XP Pro, to avoid all the little tweaks and adjustments that I'd need to make, plus reinstalling SP1, SP2, etc. etc., and a week's worth of data. (Plus I have 150 gigabytes of partially edited video for a project I'm doing on my D: drive that is not backed up).

Two people (both vendors who seemed knowledgable) told me that if I replace the mainboard with a similar one, or ideally an exact duplicate to the one that failed, that XP Pro usually would be smart enough to allow a restart without forcing a complete reinstallation, reformatting of drives, etc.

So I did exactly that, I ordered and received an identical board to the one that failed. I put all the hardware back in like it was before. When I started the computer, and after fixing a little glitch with a memory card not fully inserted, it did successfully fire up and run through the Power On Self Test. Then it did a bunch of stuff like it was testing something, but ended up saying it couldn't find the boot device, and tried to reboot to a floppy.

I restarted, and hit the F11 button to enter setup, and it gave me an option to select the boot device. But unfortunately it only provided the two dvds, the floppy, and a network connection as options. I think it is having trouble finding the hard drives because both my C and D drives are SATA, and if I remember correctly from earlier, it is hard to get Windows to think the SATA drives should be early in the drive letters. I vaguely remembering that I had to do some things to configure Windows to assign them lower letters. Even when I disconnected the DVD drives, it only showed the floppy and the network, and neither of the SATAs.

So I set the computer to boot to a DVD drive, and put in the XP installation CD. It said it was trying to load Windows, but got to a point where it gave me the option of setting up windows or repairing it. Not wanting to risk the setup and getting forced into reinstalling Windows, I tried the repair, but that didn't work (it wanted the repair disk, which I didn't make).

Now I'm stuck, not wanting to do something that would hurt my chances of an easy reconfiguration

Does anyone have suggestions on what I should try next, that is safe?

Terry

 

Try to plug the SATA drive that contains Windows into another mobo that recognizes it. Clone it onto an IDE drive. Connect this IDE drive to the problem board and see if it recognizes it and boots from the drive.

SATA is still quite a new piece of technology. Sometimes boards with built-in SATA controllers have a problem recognizing the drives. There are settings in the BIOS that can be set to use Enhance ATA Mode. This mode enables the recognition of both IDE and SATA drives. Play with these settings and see what happens.

 

Those both sound like good suggestions. The first one is problematic, because I don't have another computer with SATA capability, nor another drive with enough capacity to clone my C: drive.

Wrt your second suggestion, my problem right now is that the only portion of the BIOS that I've been able to activate (so far) is the part that selects which drive the computer will boot from, and it isn't seeing the SATA drive yet.

This seems like a catch 22. I cannot get to enough of the system or BIOS to get the computer to start off of the SATA C:drive, but if I could ever trigger that, I'd probably be back to my full configuration.

 

The BIOS option should show up before the system needs a boot drive (well, I'd think so but hardware and I don't get along so well and I could easily be wrong). However, if you put the XP CD in the drive, your PC should see a functional boot device and you should then be able to get into BIOS setup. I think.

 

Newt, you are correct. My problem was trying to work on this late at night. I'd tried to activate the BIOS with the DEL key as instructed in the manual, but was unsuccessful. However, I tried it again tonight, and was able to get into the full BIOS setup. In the meantime, MSI had responded to my e-mail request with specific instructions on how to set the BIOS for SATA drives.

After doing this, much to my delight, the computer came back completely, with no further adjustments. So the conclusion that you can replace a mainboard with a duplicate in Windows XP Pro without problems is valid.

Terry

 

When a motherboard manufacturer creates 2 ways to get into the BIOS, they really **** me off. Why? I had the same experience a few months back when I hold the Del key to go to a BIOS thinking that it was the complete BIOS. Only hours later that I realize I have to tap the Esc key to get into the full BIOS. All those hours were wasted! I work as a freelance technician who charges people by the hour. I should not have to read the manual just to get into the "main" BIOS. Incidentally, it was a Sony laptop that got me so ****** off. I hate Sony as much as I hate AOL. Why can't they just stay with convention?

 

To be fair to MSI, the distinction between the setup for choosing just the boot drive, v.s. the full BIOS setup, was fairly clearly defined in the owner's manual. But it was not evident from the POST startup screen, which could be improved.