New motherboard and Startup Repair

[John Englund]

I had very satisfying experience with Vista for about a month, then my
motherboard died. I'm in the process of trying to recover.

I upgraded the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and video card (going from AGP to
PCI-Express). Because I knew that the motherboard setup CD only had XP
drivers, I decided to see if Startup Repair would include getting me Vista
drivers. The answer is No.

Even worse, I'm now stuck in a kind of loop. That is, when I try to boot
from the motherboard CD to try installing the XP drivers (hoping they are at
least sufficient to let me start Vista and get the updated ones), I never
get to the "Press any key to boot from CD/DVD" stage (I do have the BIOS set
up to boot from that drive.) Instead, I get the Window Error Recovery
screen (the one with the "run windows in safe mode," "run windows normally,"
etc., options). When Vista fails to run, the system reboots and goes
through this sequence ad infinitum. Nothing I do seems to help - shutting
the system completely down, redoing the Startup Repair process...

Does anyone know how I can get out of this, short of completely
reinstalling Vista? Thanks in advance!

John

 

[Dan]

You could try an upgrade install of Vista, hopefully it will save your
settings and information. Failing that you will have to do a complete
install. Hopefully you have an up to date backup. Have a look at this and
see if it helps.
http://vistasupport.mvps.org/repair...using_the_upgrade_option_of_the_vista_dvd.htm

 

[John Englund]

Thanks for the feedback, Dan.

I have the backup I made before installing Vista. I think that before doing
the upgrade install, I might try doing a clean install (without activation)
to an old hard drive I have. That way, I'll know if Vista can find drivers
for the new motherboard and, if it can, I'll be able to refresh my backup
before disconnecting the old hard drive and performing the upgrade install.

John

 

[John Englund]

Hi again,

It doesn't look an upgrade install is going to work for me. "Upgrade" is
disabled when I boot from the DVD, so I'm going to have to consider a
complete install. One nice thing is that there's a command-prompt option
among the Repair tools, so at least I can add files I've changed over the
last month to my backup files beforehand.

John

 

[David B.]

As a side note, not many motherboard driver CD's are even bootable, and if
they are, it's not for the purpose of installing drivers, you don't install
Windows drivers by booting off of a driver CD.

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[John Englund]

Thanks, David. You're right - I misread the motherboard installation
instructions. In any case, I ended up having to do a clean install. To my
relief, I didn't have any problems with activation after that.