Boot CD Won't Boot After Motherboard Change

Problem with Boot CD After Changing Motherboard

The scenario:

You created a boot CD previously to help you recover in case of computer problems.  Your computer motherboard breaks down and is replaced.  You want to reinstall your old hard drive but it is giving you problems so you take out your boot CD that you created just for such a situation and are flummoxed when even your boot CD won't boot and instead you get a blue screen error message or a computer restart. Even if you can get Windows to load into RAM and allow you to access the desktop you might find expected shortcuts to be missing or hard drives and expected programs inaccessible.

There may be other reasons but one common explanation for this behavior is that in newer motherboards the BIOS is set to run the SATA controller in AHCI mode.  This is fine if your operating system is Windows 7 or newer.  However, if the operating system you wish to run is Windows XP or based on it such as a Windows PE or BartPE  run from a boot CD the boot will likely fail unless the boot CD also includes AHCI drivers and possibly other mass storage drivers.  The easiest way to deal with this at least short term is to change the SATA settings in BIOS from AHCI mode to IDE mode.

Conversely if you are trying to boot to a Windows 7 environment and are failing to do so check the BIOS SATA settings to make sure it is in AHCI mode and not IDE mode.

Now that you have entered the Bart pre-install environment with access to hard drives you can use driver injections that you have included on your BartPE CD to load drivers or reset drivers to generic default on the Windows installation on blue screening or restarting hard drive to increase the chances they will also boot.