Legit Reviews

Hi, I'm new to the board and had a question about motherboards

I previously had an asus motherboard in my system and it went out on me and now I'm tyring to put a new asus p4s800 motherboard in the same system (without reinstalling windows so I don't lose any info that was on my hard drive). Is it possible to just swap motherboards without having to reconfig everything or I'm I making a huge mistake.

Now if it is possible I'm having some issues with it. After installation System boots up but after the boot sequence it gives me an error message. It then asks me if I would like to boot windows in safe mode, standard, and a few other options. No matter what option I pick Right after I pick an option windows begins to load just for a second then a blue screen with some text flashes for a split second and the whole system restarts. This process continues in an endless loop. Don't know what to do about this, any help would be greatly appreciated.

It always depends on the type of board you switch from. But from the sound of it your not going to get it to work.

is your cpu overheating or something?

No, the cpu is running at standard temp and board recognizes everything (hard drive, graphics card, cd-rom drives etc.) System just won't let me get to windows. Sort of seems like a software issue but I'm hoping it's not.

all i know is that the same type of thing happened to me whenever i first built this thing. somehow, it ended up correcting itself or something and working. you might want to call microsoft and ask/pay for advice.

mdk416 wrote: Is it possible to just swap motherboards without having to reconfig everything or I'm I making a huge mistake.

Now if it is possible I'm having some issues with it...

It's possible, particularly if you're not switching chipsets. If you are switching chipsets, you can still get away with it in *most* cases - Windows will simply update the chipset drivers.

Even so, a fresh format/reinstallation is the best route whenever possible. In your case specifically, you may very well be headed in that direction. Check that all your components have been seated firmly, particularly the video card and RAM. Also check all cable connections, both ribbon cables and from the power supply.

Barring that, post your exact error code if you can.

The very best solution is to just reinstall windows. What was the original board? Are all the components the same as the original install? You might be able to download and install the latest chipset drivers from Intel and that could clear things up....but the surest and safest way is to back up all your critical data and simply reformat the drive as One4yu2c said.

I know this is an old thread, but there is one more possibility that we're not looking at, it's the exact same problem I had on my customer's machine, except it was MSI, but it sounds like the exact same problem. Check your memory to make sure it's compatible with the board, and on top of that, I would ask capper or Apoptosis to post the link to Memtest. It helped me out a lot, and I found a lot of errors in my memory, so I changed it out with a Corsair ValueSelect module, and it worked perfectly after that. Maybe it was pure luck, but I don't think so. Also, check your BIOS settings with the processor and memory timings and make sure they are compatible with your CPU and memory (i.e. memory latency/timing, mem FSB, cpu FSB, etc). Let me know if you find out the problem

killswitch83 wrote: post the link to Memtest.

Ask and thou shalt receive:

Memtest86 ;)

Thanks One, now I just hope mdk managed to get that problem fixed, I have memtest myself, and that's how I found my problem.

http://www.theeldergeek.com/replace_motherboard.htm Try this web site it tell how to do a mother board swap I have had this work for me twice but the third time I had to do a clean install but that was alright because I had all my important stuff on another partition and another drive in the system because I had installed sp-2 and my disc came with sp-1 it was looking for a file and would stop loading windows so I got the file off my other system and tried it but still it wouldn't proceed with the repair install it would stall at 39 minutes till complete install, That is your problem probally the boot or registry cannot find the new board so it goes to the blue screen of death. Check out there web site and see if that helps good luck.