New occurrence of an old BOOT problem...

I've just replaced a dead motherboard. Most times I've done this there have been no problems; Windows XP has recognized the new hardware and booted normally, just needing a few new mobo drivers to work 100%.

But occasionally this process won't work and Windows objects so strenuously to the new hardware that it won't boot at all. And this is what's happened today.

The annoying thing is that I'm sure the problem is only caused by a few bytes of information in an ini or ldr file and it seems a big shame to have to reinstall Windows along with the owner's associated files, just because of a few 0's and 1's in the wrong place.

Obviously, I've attempted to do a "Repair Install" but there's no Repair option available, otherwise I wouldn't be asking this question. So, before I waste another 5 or 6 hours on a full reinstall, does anyone have any ideas?

I should say that I've also tried booting from a Recovery Console CD and running 'bootcfg /rebuild' but that's done nowt.

Advice would be appreciated

 

Just go through the following link and see if it helps

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/install/other/motherboard/problems.htm

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/install/other/motherboard/problems2.htm

if these fails try to perform parallel installtion (If u hav any important data)

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/winxppro/sp2sp3installxpcdparallell/indexfullpage.htm

 

pccarehimanshu, thanks for the info. That's very useful stuff

Later: Working through the suggestions. Several of the fixes depend on accessing the system through the original board and changing the drivers or boot setup. Obviously, if the original board had failed, this won't work. However, it occurs to me that it might be possible to temporarily mount the hard drive into another system that has a more compatible board, ie, same brand and family, just a slightly different model.

Also, I'm wondering if it might be possible to use my Winternal's ERD Commander to change the necessary system files. This prog makes it fairly simple to boot into and manipulate view pretty much all of the drive's contents. Any ideas on this?

 

masonite, do you have a original XP CD or can you borrow one, then you will be able to do a XP repair, most times after changing the Motherboard you will have to do a repair to get the system working properly. You can not perform a repair install (second R) from a Recovery CD.

 

Hawk22, thanks for your response. But the problem is that, every so often, the REPAIR option isn't available. My first post explains this in more detail.