After MB replacement, windows will not boot

[thebastard]

After swapping out the old motherboard on my son's rig with a bargain ECS kt600, the machine will not boot to windows. It goes through post fine and then goes to the "We're sorry, Windows did not load properly..." try safe mode. Will not boot into safe mode. I tried replacing the DDR266 ram with a stick of ddr400, no change. I tried enabling alternate boot devices and attaching another hard drive that had an OS on it. it wll not boot to either hard drive (although they are both recognized during POST) nor will it boot from the xp cd in the cd drive. I also tried disabling raid in the bios but still no luck. I'm guessing I'm missing something in the bios.. any ideas? Oh yeah, cpu is 2200 sempron at 39c.

 

[Astro]

You need to reinstall XP, sorry. The only time you won't have to reinstall after a motherboard swap is if the chipset was the same on both motherboards.

 

[Drostie]

That's not true. I managed to swap from a Dell Socket 478 mobo to a ABIT NF-7 S v2 (which is a Socket A mobo) without having to reinstall windows later... the thing even stood up to a weekend of Prime95 torture testing. Maybe I'm just a lucky guy.

But yeah, the original poster should reinstall Windows. Don't worry, Windows XP can usually install itself over its old copy so that you lose a minimum of data.

 

[thebastard]

Perhaps I wasn't clear in the original post. There is no way to reinstall xp as the drives (all IDE drives) will not boot the machine to windows. The machine will not boot to the original install disk for Xp.

 

[thebastard]

I think there must be a bios glitch, cause it only worked when I switched the primary boot drive in the bios from floppy to hdd0 to hdd1 to cdrom. Even though cdrom was set as the third boot device already, it wasn't recognized until I made it the primary. Neither hard drive was recognized as having an OS until I reloaded xp (even though they were identified during POST). I still can't figure out why the cd wasn't recognized previously...and yes, I had 'try other boot devices' enabled. Also, the default for onboard lan was disabled, which caused a few moments of head scratching. Why would you have disabled as a default? Still, I guess you get what you pay for. Seems to be working fine now...but for my nice rigs, I think I'll stick with the Asus boards.
Thanks for your thoughts!

 

[Samstoned]

Does XP have a boot.ini file?
if so it is like W$K and I save myself lots have time when moving boot HDD's around
uncheck read only in properties for that file
open in notepad copy this file and rename to .bak save
look how the boot device call is setup here you can change just remember
if you get it wrong it may not boot
I put this backup on a boot cd and if and when I sometimes blow it up
all I do is replace this file.