stuck in boot loop.

a friend of mine has changed his motherboard, cpu and ram, kept his old hdd with windows 7 64 bit installed, but now all the pc does is loop on startup, can get into bios, and it gets to the windows loading screen but just loops back to the startup process.
specs are,
amd fx 6100
asus m5a99x evo
corsair vengeance 1866
amd hd 6870

the hard drive has a copy of windows on it and he doesnt have the boot disk for windows, we have changed hardware in this pc before with no problems but im beggining to think that its a problem with trying to keep the windows installation from the hard drive, he doesnt want to have to buy another copy of windows so any help or advice would be very appreciated.

:edit: we have flashed the bios to the latest to see if that would help but still does the same

Changing motherboards is always a crapshoot as to whether it will let you boot back into an existing install. You can do a repair or what I prefer, a clean install. However, you need the DVD for this. If they have a legit copy of Windows and need a DVD, they can contact MS to get one.

so far we are possibly getting somewhere as the disk had a resore partition on it, will post on where it gets us.

Before you do that, look in the BIOS for the SATA operation options and try fiddling with the settings to get them the same as on you old mobo. Windows will not boot, but will restart the computer instead, if the RAID settings in the BIOS are different from how windows was installed in(yes, even if you don't run a RAId array!).

have tried that and they were the same as far as we could see.

I have never successfully been able to boot into Windows after changing to another motherboard make and model. Windows configures itself in the install to the hardware of the motherboard, particularly the chipset. The restore partition would need to do a clean install of windows if this is to work. However, many box store computer manufacturers set the restore partition up so that it will only recognize the OEM computer hardware.

You should be able to get to the boot repair option from any Windows 7 install disk, that sometimes works.

My suggestion would be to back up everything and clean install windows sucks some times lol but that's the only thing you can do (i had to do the same thing for a client)

trents said:

I have never successfully been able to boot into Windows after changing to another motherboard make and model. Windows configures itself in the install to the hardware of the motherboard, particularly the chipset. The restore partition would need to do a clean install of windows if this is to work. However, many box store computer manufacturers set the restore partition up so that it will only recognize the OEM computer hardware.

Click to expand...

I have before managed to technically "steal" a windows 7 by installing it, activating it, and cloning the drive partition to a different comp's hard drive(I didn't actually use them like that, I did buy two different codes and used them properly, that was just an experiment to see if it would work .)... but it did help that the comps had the same exact make and model of mobo. But, I have also been able to get windows installs from Acer netbooks to boot easily on Dell desktops, vice versa, windows 98 SE from a 1999 HP-based gaming rig(Pretty good actually, had a PIII 850[Mhz], 384MB DRAM, and an Awesome top-of-the-line Creative Nvidia RIVA TNT2 Ultra. I considered SLI[It did have a then-3dfx-style SLI bridge connector!] but it already ran Quake, Half-Life and Myst VERY well on my 19-inch HP CRT.) on a 2011 ASUS 15.6" notebook.

EDIT: I just realized that my old RIVA TNT2 Ultra's active heatsink is now cooling my current rig's southbridge :3