Quote:
Originally posted by panbert
Makes you think though... this wouldn't have been a problem with Windows 95 or 98. Or even MSDOS. In the "old days" you COULD just slap an old hard drive to a new system and still be able to boot.
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Yup. The culprit in this case is something Microsoft calls the Hardware Abstration Layer (HAL). In the old days (6 years ago) Windows would go out and probe your devices to see what you've got and run "directly ontop of" the hardware. From an application stand-point, each app directly access the harddrive, memory, or anything else. Then Windows introduced multi-tasking, and as you might remember, that's when things got messy. Applications that didn't play well together could hang your system, leading to a pretty unstable platform. With the introduction of the HAL, applications don't directly access anything anymore. They access virtual devices provided by Windows to keep things running more smoothly. Plus, applications don't need to know anything about your individual hardware. They can simply write to files and access memory the same way on all systems despite differences in the underlying hardware.
For whatever reason, reinstalling Windows, or backing up your configuration is the only *safe* way to swap motherboards. Had the same problem awhile back, and found some useful articles on Microsoft's website.