New Motherboard & Windows XP Home

Browndoff

My Motherboard became faulty [probably due to DUST - it's a building-site here!]. I had 1GB of RAM and a 200GB Sata drive with Programmes and data I simply MUST keep! There ARE other PCs in house but none with a SATA capability and no other SATA HDD to run as a 'master' for the 200GB unit. I copied some of the more vital data off the HDD [using my Brother's PC, so I know the disk is 'readable'.

So I got a new Mboard and tried to run a 'Repair' installation of WinXP Home to enable the old SATA HDD to run with the new board - after two tries I'm still getting "Error loading Operating System"!

I tried running the 'Repair with Console' and tried "Fixboot" and "Fixmbr" and ran "Chkdsk" a few times but nothing changes the result - "Error loading Operating System"!

Please help!

Soundman

Not 100% sure but if you replace the Motherboard, aren't you supposed to do a fresh install of the OS as there will be differences relating to the BIOS and registry?

Capt'n Midnight

XP should normally have stop 7B's if the HDD drivers are different

Error loading OS - are you sure the drive is the first drive in the system ?

check that the mother board isn't using flash cache and check the ATA/SATA mode in the BIOS

if it was a very old system I'd say check CHS/LBA mode but shouldn't matter with SATA (drive geometry )

if you aren't using an SP2 XP cd , are you pressing F6 and installing SATA drivers ?


make a boot disk on another pc - format a floppy on another pc
copy ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini to it from c:\ - you can use recovery console if all else fails

Browndoff

Thanks for the attempts to help...

I AM using a Dell CD with WinXP Home SP2 [though I can't know what type Version of WinXp Home was originally installed - I have installed LOTS of updates!]. I didn't think I needed to press F6 as the new MBoard is an Intel Desktop D916GEV with a 3.2GHz Intel P4 CPU and 768MB of DDR-2 RAM @400MHz and has 4 SATA sockets [and immediately recognised the HDD in its Bios]. I have set the HDD to boot after the IDE DVD-Drive but, with or without the CD in place, attempts to boot the HDD result in the "Error loading operating system"!!!

As for the 'Repair console' approach, I used it to run CHKDSK /R, FIXBOOT and FIXMBR but none of these changed the resulting response to attempts to boot the HDD. What else can I do to get a response???

Browndoff

1- What does "XP should normally have stop 7B's" mean? I'm not a regular user of Boards and I'm NOT familiar with the jargon!

2- I set the DVD drive as #1 in the boot sequence with the SATA HDD as #2

3- The Bios recpgnises the SATA HDD by name and other PCs with SATA capability can read it as a secondary HDD [so it's not completely un-readable!!].

4- I'm using a new Dell WinXP Home SP2 CD and I was planning to re-activate using the original Product key - even ringing Microsoft if that didn't work immediately! The 'new' Mboard is an Intel D915GEV with an Intel 3.2GHz CPU and 768MB of DDR-2 RAM - it has 4 SATA sockets so I assumed it was 'ready' for the Maxtor 200GB SATA HDD without pressing F6 and installing SATA/RAID drivers. Was that wrong?

5- I used 'Repair Console' to run CHKDSK /R, FIXBOOT and FIXMBR - what should I have done next???

Capt'n Midnight

If you see a STOP error message ending in 7B it's because you aren't using the right drivers , only way to fix is to reinstall / repair over the top

if it says DELL on the CD then it's OEM and can only be used with the DELL computer it was supplied with, also it is locked to a key in the DELL BIOS which is on the DELL motherboard


If the drive is a higher number than the DVD that's not good best to have it a lower number, this depends on jumpers ( don't touch ) or which cable it's connected to - you could also swap the cabel for the DVD/ drive

Lazarus2.0

If the mobo replacement was identical I'd guess it should theoretically boot ok , but not being as tech savvy as some of the lads here ( and going by your last post it may well be a different mobo ) I'd be inclined to just get a new hard drive as they're cheap as chips these days and slave the 'old' drive to recover the data as it seems to be readable . Bear in mind that an OEM license dies with the mobo ...

Browndoff

Latest disaster:-

Seeing your comments on the Dell CD I borrowed a WinXp Home CD from a friend and tried to run a 'new' repair from that... It couldn't access the main Partition on the HDD at all!!!!! To check if that was some crazy result of using a Dell CD, I put that back in and The DELL could see its own 'creation' - but the 'normal' WinXp Home CD could NOT!!!

Is this some daft and spitefull software on Dell CDs which won't allow other versions of Windows to 'see' their installations AT ALL????

What can I do now to get back, at least, to the 'status quo'?? I need, at minimum, to be able to READ THE DATA on this HDD!