Vista Crashing on Boot With New Motherboard

Recently, I took delivery of a new ASUS P5N-D. Alight with happiness, and joy, I hastened to install it into my system, moving everything from one board to the next, etc... Thirty minutes later, I slap it all in my case, and fire up my computer.

Windows Vista Home Premium begins loading... And then crashes past the load screen. I thought to myself that this was no problem, and went to boot in safe mode to see what had caused the problem. Vista got to crcdisk.sys, sat there for a good minute and a half, and then crashed.

I thought that the motherboard might be bad, and grabbed my secondary drive. I stuck it in, installed XP, and booted it up. It worked perfectly. I wanted to test the issue on Vista, so I had a friend lend me his installation CD. I formated my secondary, installed Vista and sure enough, it booted perfectly.

Now I can only assume that Vista is holding onto the previous motherboard data, and crashing when I try to boot it on a different one...

Is there any way to get Vista to recognize the new board? I cannot lose the data on the drive, so reformatting it is NOT an option at this time.

What kind of crashing is it, do you get bsod, a complete shut down or a restart? Would loading your secondary drive as a primary and transfering your primary drive's files to format it be an option? Or is your secondary drive to small.

Irregardless of the OS, if you're replacing the motherboard with a different model you really, really, really, should do a full and clean install. Having said that, there are a few things you can try:

How to perform a Startup repair:
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/ [...] epair.html

How to perform a full system repair:
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/ [...] vista.html

How to check system files in Vista:
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/ [...] mmand.html


If that doesn't work, (and it may not), then the easiest workaround is to buy a new HDD, do a full format, and install Vista, drivers, and programs to that. Once you have it all up and running, re-attach the old HDD and recover your data.

Good luck.


{edit} I dug this up at Anand: http://forums.anandtech.com/messag [...] id=2210781