Hey, thank you for your help.
The mobo’s an old one. I can’t find one here in town. I can find a CPU though. So I think I will try it first.
I suspect the mobo. But it’s merely a gut feeling. No reason or sign that i can point to.
Maybe I’ll get the CPU tomorrow. I hope that Fry’s has a generous return policy.
There’re a number of motherboards from teh same company (ECS) that use the same drivers. Would the hd accept one of these easily?
As long as they use the same drivers it should be fine. If not, there are usually only two things that will keep a system from booting when moving a hard drive from one system to another - video drivers and IDE chipset drivers. Other stuff may break, but if the system at least boots you can pretty easily install the correct drivers for those things (USB, sound, etc.) If you’re keeping the same video card the video drivers won’t be an issue. If the IDE drivers cause a hang it’s usually a fairly simple matter to boot the machine in safe mode and change the drivers to the standard Microsoft ones in Device Manager, then boot in normal mode and load your new, correct drivers at that point.
Ahhh.
I see.
How hard would it be to get it to work in an entirely different machine?
Would it make my head explode?
Thank you again and some more for your help.
Depending on how far different the original and new computer are, it could be plug-n-chug, you could have to install some drivers in normal mode, you could have to install some drivers in safe mode, or you might have to do what we call a “maintenance reinstall” of the OS. It generally isn’t a good idea to do any of this, but if you have no other choice…
I agree that the problem is almost certainly the Motherboard or CPU, if you’ve replaced everything else and it still fails to boot. So you’ll need to replace her MB and/or CPU. Depending on how old the broken one is, you might want to do both at once, since for $50 each
However, since the hard drive won’t boot up with another MC/CPU, I suspect it may have problems. Have you yet tried installing the hard drive as a second (non-booting) drive in another working machine? Chances are good the working machine will boot up and assign D: to the disk [if not, you may have to swap cables and/or jumpers on the drives], and you can make sure it’s still OK.
You should do that and do scandisk on it (at a minimum) before trying to boot from it. I recently had a MB die, and it hosed quite a lot of the disk data on its way out.
It shouldn’t matter too much what kind of new MB/CPU you get, as long as you have the driver disk for the new MB. Windows should still boot well enough for you to install the new drivers.
And tell your friend that if any programs are that important, she needs to get the program disks sooner or later. She will need to reinstall them at some point, even if it survives the current adventure.
Any thoughts or pointers?
Is there a resource I can reference for instructions?
Her hardware is so old that I can’t find replacements here in town. The stuff just really needs replacing anyway.
Thanks for the Google reference point- “maintenance reinstall”
Yes. It behaved nromally as far as I could tell- I could open files, etc.
I ran chkdsk /r through the recovery console. Will that give a sufficiently thorough examination of the hd?
So far, I’ve only told her that I don’t know if there’s anything wrong with her hd, cuz…well, I don’t. But we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.