Windows XP startup issues

[ShaneJensen]

I just replaced my motherboard with a new one and did a repair install of Windows XP (not a reformat). It starts up in Windows but take forever on the second splash screen. It hangs for about a minute and a half before it loads up the desktop. Could this be a result of the old motherboard drivers conflicting with the new hardware? I would rather figure out how to get rid of the old inactive drivers rather than do a whole reformat of my C drive. Please help me, this is driving me batty.

[thevoelk]

It's probably not a conflict. When you get the the GUI in Windows repair, it spends a while detecting the devices. If it doesn't find a matching driver for a piece of hardware, it loads a generic driver. The reason I mention the GUI is that my MSDN/corporate copy of XP does not have a fast repair option like Windows 2000 did. The retail version may, but I've never used it. If you ran the motherboard/chipset utility, you updated the driver. If you had the incorrect mainboard/chipset driver, you would most likely boot to a Blue Screen of Death.

What I would recommend doing is searching google for some services that may be ensafely disabled. Odds are that if you did this before, the repair re-enabled the default ones.

For future reference, if you do this again, use the Sysprep utility. Here are the catches:

1) You need the same hard drive controller, so update your drive to the MS generic drivers before running sysprep.
2) Try to upgrade to the same chipset, if not processor class (i.e P4 to faster P4 and new mainboard, AMD Sempron to AMD64 with new board.) It saves you from having to repair the OS again when restoring. I do it at work going from the different classes of P4s all the time.