Boot problem .... please read.

[Devious]

I have just sold a friend a barebones system .

Case
Abit KT7a mobo
Athlon 1.33
256 meg pc133 ram

He was going to transfer harddisk , vid card , souncard etc to it.

He has just emailed me telling me he cannot get it to work. He says it started to boot up and at the end of the boot sequence it gave me a blue screen message, something like check your hard driver installation or you have a virus,or you a faulty hard drive and a long ref No

He had a pentium 3 based system before , do you think this problem is the fact it has pentium based drivers on his harddrive?

He doesnt really want to format the HD but do you think it will solve the problem ?

Any ideas ?

[rogerdugans]

Sounds like the old mobo drivers are incompatible....
If there is any way to boot into SAFE mode (F8 or space bar) that may work to unistall the old drivers and reboot then install the new ones.

A reformat/reinstall is the best way to go when changing mobos though. If the old data is not backed up, that may work to save data but the pc will run better with a clean install.

[inkleoneaters]

reinstall windows. it boots off the cd and doesnt need to format.

[paupton]

Each mobo has its own chipset that operates the Bus, memory hdd controller and fdd controller. The instruction set for each mobo MAY be different. A fresh install of the OS will allow it to record the drivers for the different mobo components. You may get lucky and put a used Hdd with Os already there to work but you may have phantom problems that are the result of wrong drivers.