My wife's mother board failed.
I took both her hard drives out and
installed them in another computer I had.
It starts to boot gets well past the bios but it hangs up
were it says on the screen "Starting Windows" above a wide
white line.
Does Windows 2000 only work on the mother board it
was installed on?
--
Paul Lamar ...No rotor no motor.
Hah! Finally a question I can partially answer! In a word, yes. See
below for an explanation and possible recovery procedures.
The Windows operating system, like most operating systems, employs
device drivers. A device driver has two interfaces: one specific to
the device being controlled, the second a standard interface to the
operating system. This makes it possible for the vast bulk of the
operating system to be device independent. Software that needs to use
the device will call the device driver with a set of parameters that
specify the action to be accomplished. All device drivers for a given
class of device will have the same operating system interface; only
the device side will be different. (Usually application software does
not call the device directly but only through several layers of other
software, some of which would be in the operating system itself
because device drivers must perform operations that require
"privileged" or "supervisor" mode. The OS can only be entered at
certain "well known" points that check the operation being requested,
and if everything is OK allow the operation to proceed.)
So, to answer the question, once Windows has loaded the device drivers
it is indeed specific to a given motherboard. Unless you can trick
Windows into re-examining the hardware it is running on and install
new, correct, drivers the operating system on the old drives will not
work. If you do manage to figure out how to do this (please tell me)
you will need the CD-ROM that has the device drivers for the new
motherboard, unless it uses only devices "known" to Windows. (Once
Windows has been installed I think all the software that inspects the
hardware and installs the correct device drivers is discarded. Sigh.)
All might not be lost, however. Get a hard drive with an empty
partition or a partition that can be overwritten. Then, if you have a
generic Windows installation CD, install Windows on the selected
partition. Once you have Windows running, you can copy whatever files
there are to be saved to where Windows can find them. For some things
you can simply tell the Windows software where it is (if you can find
it: things get squirreled away in strange places). For this reason, I
recommend that you have a separate partition for data that you want to
keep. Most applications allow you to specify where you want to keep
your data. Then it is easy to back things up. And if (when) the disk
crashes, it is relatively easy to restore.
If you only have a "system restore" CD that came with a computer with
Windows already installed, I think you might be out of luck because
that CD usually does not have the full self installing Windows: just
an image of the partition Windows uses. But for a mere $185 you can
get a genuine Windows OS installation CD! What a crappy way to do
business! But then Gates didn't get to be a billionaire by being a
nice guy.
I once worked for a CEO that said if he wasn't being sued he wasn't
doing his job! I am sure he meant it. I left shortly thereafter.
Doc Custer
Retired software engineer and sometime Audiologist
Building RV9-A. Fuselage
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