How to Avoid Complete Reinstall of Windows XP When Changing Motherboard

Posted on: August 13th, 2008

This is an advanced article about Windows repair installs that are necessary after major hardware change such as changing the motherboard.

Recently I had to change motherboard on several computers because they failed, or were unstable. I ran into considerable problems geting the Windows working again after putting in a different motherboard (the original type of motherboards were not available anymore).

If you are not familiar with the inner workings of Windows then don’t read any further.

Disclaimer: before you try any of these make sure you make a complete backup of your system that you can restore if something goes wrong.

I had almost 100% failure rate using Windows’ repair install feature. After the first reboot the computers produced BSODs which appeared at the device driver loading phase of boot sequence.

Apparently the repair install does not do a good job of cleaning up the drivers before restarting. In each case I found that there were driver references left in the registry which loaded in drivers for hardware that were no longer present and that of course does not fly too well. Thus you get BSODs.

The solution is not easy and requires a BartPE CD, or UBCD. After the first reboot of the Windows repair install, or even before that, start up the BartPE CD and edit the registry on the hard drive. You need to open HKLM/SYSTEM/ControlSet001 (which is most commonly mapped as CurrentControlSet. Open that up and rename the ‘services’ folder, then create a new, empty ‘services’ key.

After that run the Windows XP repair install again. This time it will go through.

However this is not the end of the story yet. When you restart the computer you might not have access to the CD-ROM and/or to the Floppy drive.

Here’s two Micro$oft knowledge base article on how to fix these: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/812489 and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060

You also need to move some of the keys back from the renamed registry key which load in drivers for some software such as Antivirus, CD-Burning, etc.

Hope this helps some folks out to prevent sudden loss of hair.

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