Motherboard too different for restore?

[Thrall]

Recently I had a friend's work machine's motherboard die and I've been trying to help him get his machine back up and going. After getting another new motherboard (same model), he swapped them out and kept getting a windows repair loop and an error that said that the hardware had been changed and that windows couldn't boot. He called up Microsoft thinking it was a activation issue and the M$ helpdesk worker said that the error was from the motherboard being too different from the old one and that he'd have to re-install. He proceeded to do this, but it makes me wonder how I can back up his machine's system image if this problem would happen again in the case of a motherboard failure. Could I have restored his machine from the automatic microsoft backup utility since I had it set to make a system image? Could I do an in-place re-install of windows (like via the upgrade process where windows files are replaced and the files and program and left alone) on top of his restored drive? Thanks in advance for your help!

He is currently running Windows 7 Pro OEM on an i5-2400.

 

[Athlon2K15]

kinda odd since it's the same model of motherboard,are all the settings in bios the same as before such as AHCI

 

[Thrall]

You know, I don't think he changed those back since I did them for him. Perhaps it was his ssd running in ata mode rather than ahci?

 

[chinahailin]

I once meet the same problem. Then My friend help me.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

You could try doing an in-place reinstall but in my experience, the computer just doesn't function like it should unless it is a reinstall from scratch. The IRQs and everything driver related has to be a 100% match or else there will be problems.

 

[Thrall]

So I checked the settings and he does have the sata settings right. I'm currently restoring the drive using windows backup and restore and will try and in-place re-install after that. My biggest question is though, how would I back up his machine so that if the motherboard were to fail I could just throw another one in and keep going? Thanks for your help guys!

 

[stinger608]

I don't know. I had a customer that had a system running a dual core AMD on a Gigabyte board (can't recall the model) and switched his system to a Asus Crosshair IV with a hex core and it booted and found all the drivers etc... He was also running Windows 7 Pro but it was retail.

Not sure if it has something to do with the SSD, but it sure could be.

 

[Thrall]

I'm just puzzled because we often swap hard drives between Dell machines at work because of bad mobos and never have problems. I thought it might be because it is an oem version of windows, but the microsoft guy told him that he wouldn't be able to help him because it's not even at the activation of windows part yet.

 

[Thrall]

I just had the windows backup and restore format the drive and restore it using the latest backup and it seems to be working now. I'm not sure what fixed it, but it's working at the moment. Perhaps the windows system image isn't just an exact image of the backup but something more complex?

 

[Jetster]

I would clean install anytime you change a MB. You will get one problem after another. Its just faster in the long run