New mobo, cant boot

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Bjm2587 said:

It then tells me to put in my installation disk and run repair. I bought this as a compaq and vista already came preinstalled. Any ideas?

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Borrow a disc from someone, and repair the installation.

Did you follow the directions on this page?

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial148.html

Try booting to the DVD, pick an option that gives you a command prompt, and run fixmbr.

That's /probably/ right, but I don't remember phrasing it that way. It's been awhile, and my memory's fuzzy.

Ok, going by this page...

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/.../proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx?mfr=true

Just typing fixmbr will write a new boot record to your primary boot drive. This is what I've always done, and if you aren't running a peculiar boot setup should work for you.

Sorry you couldn't get it going an easier way :^(

Usually the only time you can change motherboards on a working Windows install is either when the board is identical or has the same chipset, or you change your hard drive controller driver to a standard windows driver like msahci or standard ide/atapi before the swap. Otherwise Windows is going to try to load and boot from a disk controller driver that doesn't exist in your system anymore, and then fail to boot.

Bjm2587 said:

Oh, makes sense. I learned the hard way. I will definitely remember that next time I upgrade. Would it have been possible to load the motherboard drivers on the old system before switching to the new one?

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Depends on the drivers. If they were "have disk" drivers like you use during a Windows install, then most likely. You could do that with XP, tbh I haven't tried with Vista or Win 7. Ideally, all you would have to do is add hardware, pick scsi/raid controller, and have disk your drivers. Easiest thing is just to switch to a standard driver though like msahci or standard ide/atapi like I mentioned before. Then once you're up on the new board, you can install the chipset drivers and change the mode in bios to ahci. If you're running an onboard raid 0 this is pretty much not an option though, since most of the controllers have their disks formatted differently. Anyway, once you've done that, viola...all up and running.