WinMBoardMig and Windows XP SP3 is Bad

Whatever you do, do not use WinMBoardMig.zip if you are running Windows XP SP3 as it copies SP2 files over your SP3 files which will stop you computer from being able to boot. I leant this the hard way.

I ran this in the hope that it would allow me to migrate a Windows XP installation from one motherboard to another without having to reinstall. Unfortunately after I ran it and rebooted I found I could no longer boot with the original motherboard, let alone the new one. Normally Windows XP checks disks on start up and this is where it decides to fail with something like "Autochk not found -Skipping autochk.exe" then promptly reboots or BSOD. If you computer reboots at this point you can press F8 before it boots and choose not to reboot on failure then you will see the BSOD. I found I was also unable to get into get into safe mode. It hung after showing the list of drivers it loads.

As bad as this seems, I was able to fix it. I plugged the harddrive with the damaged Windows XP installation into another computer. From here I could see in the two directories in the WinMBoardMig I had run which contained system files:

WinMBoardMig\CriticalDrivers
04/08/2004 15:00 95,360 atapi.sys
04/08/2004 15:00 5,504 intelide.sys
17/08/2001 14:51 3,328 pciide.sys
03/08/2004 23:59 25,088 pciidex.sys

WinMBoardMig\Kernel
03/08/2004 23:59 105,472 hal.dll
03/08/2004 23:59 131,968 halaacpi.dll
03/08/2004 23:59 81,280 halacpi.dll
03/08/2004 23:59 150,656 halapic.dll
03/08/2004 23:59 134,400 halmacpi.dll
03/08/2004 23:59 152,704 halmps.dll
03/08/2004 23:59 77,696 halsp.dll
04/08/2004 00:18 2,148,352 ntkrnlmp.exe
03/08/2004 23:59 2,056,832 ntkrnlpa.exe
03/08/2004 23:59 2,015,232 ntkrpamp.exe
04/08/2004 00:20 2,180,992 ntoskrnl.exe

All I needed to do was find out where it had copied them and replace them with files of similar names from the SP3.cab files that were also on this system.

In order to fix any issues here the computer you are booting and doing the fixing from needs to be able to see hidden and system files and also be able to see file extensions. My damaged XP install was on drive F: here as I had booted on another computer. I found the SP3.cab in two locations:

F:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386\sp3.cab
F:\WINDOWS\Driver Cache\i386\sp3.cab

I was able to open the sp3.cab files as if they were ordinary zip files using WinRAR.

I went through the list of files I found in WinMBoardMig one by one searching (F3 in explorer) for these files in my damaged installation. Not all of the files existed, but for those I found that matched the size of those from WinMBoardMig needed replacing with the equivalently named file from the SP3.cab.

I found files from WinMBoardMig\Kernel in F:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers and files from WinMBoardMig\Kernel in F:\WINDOWS\system32.

After I replaced the files I was able to boot on the original motherboard again. Now I was ready to try a different approach.