I have to replace my Motherboard due to Lightning Damage. I had a MSI G43M2 Motherboard and are now replacing it with a MSI G31TM Motherboard. Windows 7 does not repair my startup files. I have also tried with the Windows 7 Profesional CD to do a repair. From your forum I see that I have to do a advanced custom install but even that does not work, I get a message that there is a previous version of windows installed. I do not want to format my harddrive. I normally replace my motherboards every 6 months and if I need to do a clean install every time it will become a major problem for me. With windows XP there was a repair that had to be done and the new motherboard worked without problems. Is there a way that the same can be done in Windows 7. I also tried to boot in save mode but Windows restart every time.

Use Startup repair.. Startup Repair is an extremely useful tool which you are able to use from the Windows 7 boot CD, which allows you to repair damaged installations. Problems such as corrupt MBR, missing files and boot problems can often be fixed by running this utility. Insert your Windows 7 DVD in to a DVD drive and restart your PC to boot from this device (you may be prompted to "press any key" to boot from a CD/DVD drive). If you have a recovery partition instead of the installation CD, choose this during the advanced BIOS options stage. After a little wait for loading, you will be presented with the Windows 7 installation screen. Select your language and keyboard input method and then click OK to continue: Then select Repair your computer from the bottom right hand corner (not the install now button). Clicking this will search for installed versions of Windows 7 on your computer which you can then attempt to repair: Once the scanning has finished, you will be prompted to select your Windows 7 install drive. Usually there is only 1 option. Click this and then the next button: A list of recovery options will then appear, from which you should click Startup Repair: Windows 7 will then scan your computer for any potential problems: If any problems are found, you will be prompted to select the appropriate course of action. In this instance, no errors were found so there is no option to repair. Regards..

Just fixing the boot will not help here. You need to do an inplace upgrade of the OS, the two motherboards are too different to just try to use the same drivers.

In-place Upgrade should work. However, if you cannot boot into the system, you need to reinstall the system as a final solution. Arthur Xie - MSFT