A co-worker asked me if I could swap a motherboard and power supply for him. He had all the parts and his system restore cds. I asked him if there was anything important on the drive that was not allready backed up he said yes. slapped the drive in another machine to burn the files and it wouldn't boot. so I slaved it and got the files that way. so far so good, didnt even cross my mind to wander why it did not boot.
swaped the hardware, hoked it all back up and then tried to boot. Got to the XP logo and screen flickerd and boot screen is back...

no big I just redo the install, still didnt work.
Little time on google I find that the lovely folks at emachine hard codes the XP install to the mobo bios. so if your mobo dies so does your XP.
so heads up if you or a relative has a emachine. My co-worker was rather bumbed when I told him that he was going to have to buy an xp disk.