Switching Motherboards?

Hey all, ive been having problems with my system and while others claim it is my power supply, i think it is my motherboard. I borrwed my friend's system while he's out of town and so i want to switch his mobo with mine to see if that is the problem. However i heard that people have problems moving a currently installed OS to a new motherboard without a fresh install. This true? And if so, what kind of problems, would it just not load windows or is the possibility of hard drive corruption an issue? Figured i may as well ask first before potentially screwing myself over.
Thanks!

depends what chipset they are,stick a drive with via drivers in an nforce and it will just never boot

Both nforce2, my Epox 8rda3+ to an A7n8x (normal version, but still nforce2).

That will probably work. AT least to some degree. I would think you'd for sure be able to get it to boot. nVidia uses a unified chipset driver, so you'd at least have basic functions. Maybe not the onboard periphs though.

YMMV, this is an at-your-own-risk kinda thing. Make backups of your data....

As the others have said, when swapping motherboards with the same chipset, you'll probably have few to no issues.

When you try it with a motherboard that has a different chipset, there is a good chance that it will not boot. But even then, a Repair Installation of XP or 2000 has always solved the problem for me.

You say a repair install fixed it. I finally got around to switching and it was fine at first (bummed out on my vid drivers, but errored before i could do reinstall) then bombed out cause of my vid drivers. Tried rebooting but it game me blue screen errors about my OS. I didn't try to repair cause i went to try another hd and it failed too, same blue screen. Something bout either bad OS or bad HD, so a repair install would fix this? Anyways moved back to my Epox board to make sure it wasnt my HD and its just fine (apart from the errors im testing against).

Why don't you try swapping the power supplies first and see if your problems go away? That is much easier.

Wow because i *gasp* did already! 3 seperate (2 almost new) PSUs and all gave teh same problems, which is of course why i think its the mobo.

I pulled an HD with xp installed on it out of a system running an old MSI mobo and athlon 800, and plugged it straight into an abit nf7-s, barton 2500+ (whole new system). It worked pretty much fine, though xp found a LOT of new hardware.

The drive is back in the old system now (it still works, but xp has got kinda clunky and doesn't always shut down properly - oh well, I'll do a fresh install one day soon)