I had a Dell that had its motherboard burn out. I replaced it with a better and slightly different motherboard but one that supports all my other hardware. I installed all the existing hardware to the new motherboard and all started great except that when Windows XP attempted to load the computer rebooted itself. Now every time I try to start the computer it always either reboots itself or hangs up at Windows startup. I have tried everything I know in the BIOS settings including loading defaults, loading fail-safe, and changing other items one at a time. Here is what I have:

Maxtor 40GB DiamondMax Plus ATA/133
256MB DDR RAM
Pentium 4 2.4GHz
Matsonic MS9127C motherboard w/Award BIOS

At a guess: Possibly there is something else in the PC that caused the motherboard to burn out and is causing this other problem.

It's a bit late now, but if the PC is a P4 it must be reasonably new. Would it still have been under guarantee? You could have sent it back to Dell for free repairs.

If you can start in safe mode (press f8 every second or so until boot menu appears) use the CD that came with the motherboard and install the drivers.

I actually came to this post searching for a problem with the same motherboard you bought, but I think I know the solution to your problem. Usually when you upgrade the motherboard, you would also have to reinstall the Windows OS. I had it happen where I switched motherboards and windows would seem to work, but then freeze.

My problem is that my computer freezes while booting, before it can even get to windows :/

Unless you need some special drivers, you should not need to reinstall the OS when you change mobos.

As to your problem, if its freezing during the POST then there is some issue with either your BIOS or one or more peripherals. You will probably need a tech who has tools to diagnose this.

Howdy:

Actually, when you changed the mobo and kept the original hdd with XP on it, you shot yourself in the foot..

XP will boot looking for all the old mobo drivers which won't be there..

You need to boot using your XP cd and run a Repair install.. Be forewarned though, you will need to re-install all service packs and critical updates/hotfixes but everything else should stay just as is!

Murray

Sorry but I got to side with Scott here, you don't need to re-install XP after changing motherboards. I've done it enough times. The main problem I find with doing this is the IDE controller driver. If you've installed a specific driver rather than the standard, and the new mobo has a different controller onboard, sometimes you cannot boot.

The answer to this is to change the driver back to standard IDE controller. I do this on all systems I look at as it is a lot easier to do before you have problems with the mobo than after. In fact I don't know how to change it afterwards (I've always been able to re-insert the old mobo and change it) from the recovery console.

Anyway if you can boot into windows you just need to install the drivers that came with the motherboard (not the IDE one!) and you should be back to normal. You don't need to re-install service packs or hotfixes.