Replacing motherboard, can I repair install Win7?

tholley · 14 Feb 2011

I have an old(?) HP Pavilion a1630n desktop pc. It originally came with XP, but I bought a Win7 retail cd and installed it as a dual boot, about a year or so ago.
If it matters it has a AMD Athlon 64 X2, and GeForce chipset.

The mb seemed to have died, the power supply test well within tolerances (even tho I have ordered another), and touching the 2 pins the power button connects to on the MB does nothing. (I have also done numerous other troubleshooting)

Any way I have 2 questions... Do I need to replace it with a MB of the same chipset? I was looking at one with an ATI Radeon chipset.

Also... will I be able to (or have to) do a Win7 repair install, so as not to lose my HDD data?

Thanks for any help!

Maguscreed · 14 Feb 2011

Tricky question to answer, (just so many variables.) though I can tell you with a fair degree of certainty that you may have to reactivate your copy of windows with the new hardware, as windows will think it has been plugged into a new computer.

theog · 14 Feb 2011

If your old HD is SATA.

For Windows 7 Take a look at this tutorial:
Windows 7 Installation - Transfer to a New Computer

For Win XP take a look at those two tutorials:

SATA Drivers - Load in Windows XP Setup on Dual Boot

XP Repair Install

whs · 14 Feb 2011

Whatever you do, I suggest you backup your data and/or move it to a seperate data partition - just to be on the safe side: Data Partition

tholley · 14 Feb 2011

theog said:

If your old HD is SATA.

For Windows 7 Take a look at this tutorial:
Windows 7 Installation - Transfer to a New Computer

For Win XP take a look at those two tutorials:

SATA Drivers - Load in Windows XP Setup on Dual Boot

XP Repair Install

sounded like a good idea, and yes I have a SATA HDD, but the MB is dead, no power whatsover, so I don't see how this could work for me.

ignatzatsonic · 14 Feb 2011

tholley said:

Any way I have 2 questions... Do I need to replace it with a MB of the same chipset

If you intend to use the same processor (and apparently you do), the new motherboard would have to have the same CPU socket as the old motherboard. The chipset is another matter.

Zepher · 14 Feb 2011

Windows 7 is pretty good at booting up with a different mobo and chipset, so I am pretty confident that it will work for you.
XP on the other hand is a hit or miss.

We are up to 5 mobo/cpu swaps so far with Windows 7 and all of them booted up, found the new devices, installed them, rebooted, and we were up and running.

merkat106 · 14 Feb 2011

If you get a mobo with the same chipset, then both OS should be okay without reinstallation. If it is another chipset, then you probably have to reinstall both (although 7 probably will boot up fine).

GeneO · 14 Feb 2011

I tried it once with dissimilar motherboards. It didn't work. Maybe as mentioned if the chipsets are the same.

Bill2 · 14 Feb 2011

1) Retail win7 license is fully transferrable as long its only used on a single computer at a given time. What happens is when you first activate it, it gets tied in MS's memory to a hardware hash that is a composite of various hardware components on that computer, the most significant being the mobo. Now, when you uninstall from one computer and install on another, there may be problems activating because MS's servers may think you're trying to use a single license on 2 computers.

If online activation fails (mostly it'll go through), you just need to do the phone activation.

Activate Windows 7 by Phone

So feel free to make whatever changes you feel like.

2) A repair install doesnt make sense here- if you change the mobo type, you'll need new drivers. Repair install fixes severely corrupted OS files, thats all.