Sometimes, replacing a broken motherboard is easy… other times its not.

This PC would sometime only work for a few minutes before shutting down… mostly it just wouldn’t start… other times it would complain about the CPU temperature…

So I look at cleaning the fan first… no change.

While the side cover was off, I see that fans would spin for about 20 seconds before stopping… Sometime they would stop while the PC continued its boot sequence! Now I understand the temperature message.

I change the power supply, but nothing changes.

I eventually notice (I should have seen it sooner!), that a few motherboard capacitors were bulging… OK its a motherboard fault.

Customer agrees to get a new replacement PC, and I get started cloning the old 40Gb hard drive to the newer 250Gb drive.

I then plug in the drive into the new PC (intel DG31PR motherboard)… and XP starts with no BSODs :-O

I was expecting to do an XP repair install, but it looks like I’ll just need to install some drivers! I wish all upgrades were this easy.

But I spoke too soon…

While installing the various drivers from the supplied intel CD, I get an error with the sound card: the device co-installer is invalid.

I look at device manager, and it shows it has some generic audio device installed.

I try to uninstall, but I’m told: Failed to uninstall the device. The device may be required to boot up the computer.

What? The computer might not boot if the sound drivers are missing! If you believe that, then I’ve got some land for sale 🙂

I try a quick and dirty solution: delete the device driver files… but after that, I just can’t get the sound to work.

While trying to fix the sound, I saw in XPs add/remove programs, that there is an entry for the CMI sound (on the old PC), plus an entry for the Broadcom LAN (also from the old PC). That gave me an idea:

I re-clone the drive from the original.

I then start XP in safe mode.

Ignore (cancel) all “found new hardware” prompts

Uninstall CMI and Broadcom applications

Reboot into safe mode… ignore all found new hardware prompts again

run the intel driver CD… and I was relieved that the sound driver installed correctly.

If it didn’t work, then my only option would be to install a separate sound card (not an elegant solution).