Replacing Defective Sandy Bridge Motherboard

hubbs49

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Like many people, I will need to swap the defective motherboard with a replacement from the manufacture. In my case it is an Asus P8P67 Pro running windows 7 Home 64. Since the boards are identical, is it just a matter of removing the old board, moving the CPU to the new board and then installing the new motherboard? What steps need to be taken to do this correctly?
 
^+1 Hate to admit it, but I would do to same. I build rigs and have Flash Drives with OS installers, and I don't screw around 'fixing.' I would also do a FULL FORMAT.

At the VERY least run System File Checker and Scan of Bad Sectors once transfered. I hope you moved everything off the Intel SATA2 ports.
Scan-Drives-Windows-7.jpg
 
'Hopefully' Microsoft will have a list of MOBO types and 'see' the P67/H67 and not require the longer Online or Phone call PITA and simply allow the normal process to work. NO ONE will have a 'real' problem in RE-Activation.

My experience in replacing like-for-like MOBO is a reactivation 'is required' when moving to the SAME MOBO model. I build my rigs the same and sometimes relocate a HDD for one reason or another and the RE-Activation comes up.
 

hubbs49

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Thanks, good advice everyone. The only device still on a SATA2 port is the DVD drive. My plan would be to save an image of the system drive and a copy of the BIOS to an external USB drive immediately before replacing the motherboard. If I run into trouble with the simple swap then I would restore from the image. If that fails then I would format and reinstall.
 

hubbs49

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Just an update for anybody interested. I swapped the original ASUS P8P67 PRO for the B3 revision today. Indeed it was a simple swap. It booted into Windows without issues. Windows re-activation was not required.
 

hubbs49

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When I rebooted after the install my network cable was unplugged (missed connecting it). I rebooted a number of times after that for driver install and an update to Windows service pack 1. Windows did not ask for reactivation but I just noticed that AUTO Activation was set for 3 days.