Switching motherboards

[Carc369]

Ok, so when I built my first computer I went budget on everything. Well now I regret it completely. I built my computer back in the beginning of August and it just recently crashed on me in the middle of December. It lasted about 4 months total. Well I found out it was my motherboard that had failed. I had bought a Jetway JBI-600 X58 mobo. I rma'ed it and they no longer carry it. Since I bought it from Newegg they told me they'd give the credit to Newegg so that Newegg can give me the credit back. Well now I have to change motherboards.

Well my question is:

I lost my windows 7 cd and the cd key. Does that matter when changing motherboards or is Windows 7 gonna still work because its installed in my Hard Drive. I'll probably be going with a Gigabyte mobo.



Current Specs:

Rosewill Challenger Case
Gigabyte GA-X58-USB3
XFX Radeon HD 5850
12 GB Mushkin Enhanced RAM @ 1333
1 TB HDD
Lite-On DVD-RW
Intel i7-930
Windows 7 home basic

 

[r-sky]

You will need the CD at the least to do a repair install...

 

[pjmelect]

As r-sky said you will need the CD to do a repair install. Unfortunately if you do this your Windows will no longer be activated and if you find the CD key it will not work. You could try and phone Microsoft and try to convince them that you have changed the motherboard as I have heard that this sometimes works otherwise you will have to buy another copy of Windows. But without the CD key forget it.

 

[jsc]

One of the things that the Windows validation procedures look at is the MAC address of any connected/embedded ethernet adapters. So, new motherboard, new ethernet adapter.

And that means that you will need a disk with a key.