Ok, i successfully installed the new motherboard and the old hardware in my pc. There was a problem with the processor though, when i took it out of the package i noticed 3 pins on the corner were bent over. I thought it was done for, but dad said that it's worth a shot of bending them back and seeing if it will work before sending it back. So we straightened them (about 20 minutes of tedious work with a pocket knife) and it seemed to work. It went through the bios just fine, everything seemed to run ok. But, when we try to load windows, it just reboots. I attempted to run safe mode to see what happens, and it does load several files into memory before rebooting, so im confused as to whether the processor is the problem or not. There may be minor damage and that could be the problem so that when it gets warmed up loading those things it reboots (or perhaps that's at the point where windows switches over from real to protected mode during boot (winxp)). Either way, there's one other thing that was nagging me. I'm not sure how window's handles missing hardware devices, as far as i know it should just load and $$$$$ about them not being there, but perhaps not. See, with this new motherboard, im not sure how i need to hook in the cdrw and dvd drives, the board itself has a built in slot of cd...but im not sure if that's just what i want as the master drive, or if it means the cdrw. Anywho neither of them are plugged into the board and that made me think perhaps windows was the problem. any ideas?
It's a pain in the butt to go through all this stuff, but I guess if you're increadibly lucky you can do it without losing any data.
