Vista Unbootable after replacing mobo

Hi

I have taken a charity case - dead mobo with Vista Home Premium installed.

Replaced Mobo, and now I can't get Vista to boot; The mobo was not a like for like replacement

I have tried in vain to use recovery from the recovery partion, which tells me it cannot fix this. Same for x64 recovery iso download from site referenced in these forums.

Here's what I can do with the computer: access drive from dos prompt after booting to recovery partition/or recovery disk/ linux image, etc.

Here's what I can't do: boot using any option such as safe mode, safe mode with networking, last known good config, etc.

The system tries to load and then reboots; if I tell it not to reboot I get BSOD.

I have run chkdsk/f and it found a repaired a few minor things.

I have run the BCD tool as recommended by Microsoft with no relief, including exporting, renaming old bcd and rebuilding the bcd; only thing changed was loss of access from boot option to go to the recovery partition - no love lost there!

I strongly suspect this is hardware and driver related, but I'm coming to the same posting instructions ad nausem everywhere I turn.

I'm looking for a way to dig deeper and source the problem, which would have to be done via command line at this point.

History: this machine is approx 2 years old, HP with Duo Core. Owner stated it started to reboot during use and then finally wouldn't boot at all. Ruled out powersupply and replaced mobo with close match, not exact. I believe he stated the problems with old mobo started after a power outage.

Since many resources assume boot is still possible via safe mode they use GUI interfaces: I need something that uses command line .

I will try and do a virus/malware check on this drive sometime today, but looking for more help beyond this as I'm fairly convince the install doesn't like something hardware/driver related.

Any help would be appreciated.

Sean

I've been playing with a similar scenario at home. What I'm doing is trying to move a Windows installation from my Desktop to my Laptop.

Right now I'm trying to copy all of the Services and Drivers that load from the registry of the laptop to the registry of the Desktop (HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services) - that's gonna take remotely editing the registry.

Once that's done, then I'll copy the appropriate drivers (from C:\Windows\System32\drivers) from the Laptop to the Desktop (actually, I'll have to go find them as the Laptop is 32 bit and the Desktop is 64 bit)

Re: Vista Unbootable after replacing mobo-resolved

OK -fixed - I'm posting this as it may be of some use to others in the future -

The core of the problem was as I suspected - the nvstor.sys driver was balking at the Intel chipset.

Since the original mobo was made by Foxconn, and therewas no info at their site about it, I used deductive reasoning and my fingernail to determine the original boards chipset: deductive becuase I have another Foxconn board for an AMD here in box and it uses Nvidia; fingernail was used to verify this by scraping off the thermal grease on southbridge controller (after removing heatsink).

Once I had this nugget of info I tried loading drivers by booting from the rescue disk - this didn't work. I next booted the drive from my personal computer and was able to do so sucessfully, but not with out the angst of watching Windows plug and play install a bunch of drivers for my board, graphics card and AMD processor.

Since the new mobo driver disk would not load the chipset drivers automatically, and no matter how hard I tried to remove the new drivers Windows had installed, I decided to remove the Nvidia drivers in a bifurcated maner: uinstall the software and then delete anything that said nvxxx.sys from the System32/drivers folder.

I still could not boot on the new mobo, so as a last ditch effort, I ran sysprep gui and used generalize and oobe.

On boot with new mobo Windows now halted with error "cannot find nvstor.sys, run [worthless] repair." After booting repair disk to the c: prompt and searching for 'nvstor' in regedit I learned this was SCSI driver - of sorts. The next problem was that there was no obvious scsi driver in the new mobos disk of driver (obvious = scsi or stor in the name).

Undaunted, I used the restore disk to load the iastorv.sys driver from the restoredisk (Windows\System32\DriverStore directory).

Reboot, led to the same familar message... what to do? Find a new way...

I booted to the restore and went to the C prompt. Copied the iastorv.sys file to the root directory, renamed it nvstor.sys, then copied it back to the drivers directory. Sucess!!

Now for the re-activation of OEM windows. Naturally, Windows said hell no to the key already in it, and told me to buy a new key, contact HP, or go away. I started a chat with HP, and after explaining my sad state-of-affairs and answering some specifics, the tech prompted me "did you try using the key on the sticker on the side of the computer?" DUhhhhhh, no (yes, you know where this is going...).

So I finger-punched in the Alpha-numeric key, and waddya-know? The strange thing is that activation code in the system properties box looked exactly the same to me after activation as it did before activation (could be a conspiracy).

Glad to hear it's working for you! Thanks for letting us know!