Advice after mobo changeover

[Rikki]

Hi folks.

Well disaster struck (literaly) on Thursday night. There was a mild thunder storm which passed overhead and all was well in the house. I went out for a bit but as I was driving away I noticed that the storm had returned with avengence. By the time I got home the circuit breaker had tripped and on resetting I found that my Freeview box wasnt working and neither were my two PC's. I changed the PSU's over and one of them fired up (my backup) but the main one wasnt for having it.

Took it along to a local PC shop who popped the ram, cpu and vga cards out and onto a test bench (wish I had all the spare bits to test with myself) and said the mobo was at fault. Problem being it was a last of the line AGP mobos I'd bought from here about a year and half ago along with a decent AGP card and I didnt want to have to reinstall windows.

The mobo that blew was a Gigabyte K8NSNXP-939 and luckily I found a local PC shop that had a similar K8NSC-939 in stock. I bought it and only realised when I got it home it lacked things like firewire and a system fan connector but those are minor details. It had all the important bits and was an identical board to what I had before, minus a few bells and whistles.

After rebuilding the system I set the BIOS and loaded Windows, everything kicked in the way it should but at the final point up pops a message "Windows has recovered from a serious error" - bugger. I moved it to the side and went in and disabled / uninstalled some of the missing bits like RAID controllers and such like from device manager and rebooted but it still popped up. I clicked the DONT SEND button 38 times and then windows loaded up and connected to the net as if nothing had happened.

So my question folks is this, any idea whats causing the popup error message? I went for a near identical mobo to save the grief of a windows reinstall and by all accounts it seems to be working, minus the laborious clicking the box near on 40 times.

Any help greatly received.

Kind regards,

Rikki

 

[malccy]

Although the m/boards may be similar they are not the same; i'm afraid it needs a fresh install of Windows and then of course the motherboard drivers etc.

Quite suprised you managed to get into Windows tbh.

 

[PinkFloyd]

Its possible to change the motherboard completely without reinstalling windows. SO I doubt you need to reinstall it when its a slightly different model, might even work straight off....
No harm in trying.

 

[Rikki]

Yeah thats what Im saying, its all working fine but it popped up with the serious error thing.

Since then I went in and removed a few things like the Silicon driver for RAID/SATA and the second LAN driver since these are no longer on the replacement board.

Windows booted up fine, but Im not counting my chickens yet. Only other bast is that Word wont work without reactivation and all my CD's are in the office

R.

 

[rscosworth]

unlucky mate,

ive had a surge protector for years and im glad i had it the other night - storm was the worst ive ever seen, went on for a good 2hrs

its a hard lesson learned,,,,

 

[Rikki]

unlucky mate,

ive had a surge protector for years and im glad i had it the other night - storm was the worst ive ever seen, went on for a good 2hrs

its a hard lesson learned,,,,

Very glad that it didnt toast more, and most importantly the data on my drives.

Surge protectors do ****, I've got 2 of them here and expensive ones. A spark friend put it in simple terms for me. If lightning can jump from the cloud to the earth then a 4 gang extension socket with a fancy relay and capacitor aint gonna stop it travelling down the wire.

I've learned to disconnect everything from everything. Mains, network cables, telelhpone/dsl cable and tv aerial.



Rikki

No swearing. FF.

 

[NightmareXX]

Well maybe it won't protect you from lightening but most surge protectors will insure all items connected provided their total cost doesn't exceed X amount.

I think my surge protector is insured up to £10,000 of equipment.

Don't surge protectors have huge fuses as well? Or some other fancy thing that makes em work?

 

[Ladforce]

Very glad that it didnt toast more, and most importantly the data on my drives.

Surge protectors do ****, I've got 2 of them here and expensive ones. A spark friend put it in simple terms for me. If lightning can jump from the cloud to the earth then a 4 gang extension socket with a fancy relay and capacitor aint gonna stop it travelling down the wire.

I've learned to disconnect everything from everything. Mains, network cables, telelhpone/dsl cable and tv aerial.



Rikki

No swearing. FF.

i dont think surge protectors have a relay or capacitor. i think they just work by making a conductive route to ground if a threshold voltage is breached. when the peak goes down, the conductive route changes back to being non conductive and the voltage goes on the normal path to the appliance.

 

[Rikki]

i dont think surge protectors have a relay or capacitor. i think they just work by making a conductive route to ground if a threshold voltage is breached. when the peak goes down, the conductive route changes back to being non conductive and the voltage goes on the normal path to the appliance.

Not quite sure on the mechanics of how it works, maybe I was giving the device too much credit there

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/surge-protector.htm/printable

"The most familiar source is probably lightning, though it's actually one of the least common causes. When lightning strikes near a power line, whether it's underground, in a building or running along poles, the electrical energy can boost electrical pressure by millions of volts. This causes an extremely large power surge that will overpower almost any surge protector. In a lightning storm, you should never rely on your surge protector to save your computer. The best protection is to unplug your computer."

Noted for future reference

R