Changing Motherboard Without Re-installing Windows

Windows 2000 and XP are very picky about the hardware they run on and, in most cases, rebooting these operating systems after swapping out your motherboard will result in a boot failure and BSOD (blue screen of death). There is however a way to avoid re-installing Windows and that is doing a repair installation. After swapping out your motherboard and sucessfully getting to the BIOS, ensure that the boot order includes the CD-ROM. Then, insert your Windows installation CD into the drive and reboot. For XP users, do the following once booted to Windows Setup:

(1) Press ENTER to setup Windows XP now.
(2) Press F8 to agree to the EULA.
(3) Press “R” to begin a repair installation.

At this point, it will go through the entire setup process as usual, but what it is doing is simply re-installing all of the system files. All of your user settings, registry and data will remain intact.

Once the installation is complete, XP users will need to re-activate their installation of Windows with Microsoft once again. Once this is done, you will also need to run Windows Update again to re-patch Windows. After this, you should be up and running.

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