last month the CPU on my garage PC kicked. I bought another motherboard and CPU.
I booted up and reset the BIOs. So now it boots to the device identification screen for the 2-3 seconds (and identifies everything), then acts as if its gonna start XP, and it reboots the PC, and runs through the process again.
The hard drive still has XP and all my settings/files still loaded on it. So i’m hesitant about resetting anything.
did you buy the same kind of mobo or did you get a different one? that install of xp still has all of the drivers for the last mobo… might need reformatted? just throwin it out there
XP may not like having a new motherboard, but it will try to boot up. Any error beeps from the mobo, can the bios see the hard drive, is the bios set up to boot from the hard drive?
Regardless of new hardware XP will still attempt to boot using built in generic drivers.
Is the hard drive recognized in the BIOS?
Try tapping F8 during POST and see if it’ll give you the option to boot into safe mode. If it does, boot into safe mode and install the drivers for that CPU and motherboard.
If not, boot to your XP CD as if you were installing Windows fresh and you should be given the option to do a repair install. Run that and you should be able to boot into XP. Install new drivers and you’re set. I would recommend that after you do get the machine up and running get your important data off and do a fresh install.
i decided to try it again tonight. i pulled the good hard drive out, and put in a empty spare one i had. Put my XP restore CDs in, it loaded the CDs onto the hard drive. When i restarted it went to the DOS startup prompt, and told me i could either hit DELETE for bios, of F8 for BBS setup. I tried both ways. I still get the same result. The computer makes it to the “Startup in SafeMode, or SafeMode with Networking, or Last Startup Settings” whichever one i chose, it restarts the system, and i’m back to square 1.
a drivers CD came with the motherboard, and i’ve tried booting to that, but no results.
all hardware is recognized in the BIOs, and i’ve tried reorganizing them, and booting to each, and no results.
Cool. Boot to xp cd and repair the windows installation on the current partition. It won,t erase your user data
But you will have to reinstall drivers and apps. Windows can’t boot to foreign chipset and hardware.or a driver cd. Lawl. Repairing windows installation will recognize new devices and boot to windows.
And I don’t mean recovery console. Let setup get past that prompt, up to partition selection. Then do the repair.
alright got it working. i installed XP on the spare hard drive. now i plugged in the old harddrive as a slave, and went in to get my pics & vids… and i can access every folder, BUT “My Documents”.
Western Digi offers data recovery as a service, but can i get to it by myself? The folder says its not accessible, and my access is denied.