OK, i had an old compaq 450mhz PIII, and had an extra p4 2.26 chip/mobo layin around, so i took the HD, cd/dvd/floppy's from the compaq, and hooked it all up to the ASUS board. Now i get an NTLDR missing error Jumpers are set right and it shows all drives correctly in BIOS. What can i do? The HD was fine an hour ago.

here is the FIX Boot the W xp CD, en E for repairconsole To replace damaged ntldr and ntdetect.com you can copy fresh files from the XP CD using the COPY command. At the Command Prompt type the following COPY D:\i386\NTLDR C COPY D:\i386\NTDETECT.COM C (d: = cdrom, or whatever you use) type FIXBOOT ... Reboot and ENJOY No question is a stupid question!!

Of course, it is missing since you replace a new motherboard!!! I just upgraded my BIOS (putting in a new chip) and Windows XP Pro was screeming bloody murder! I had to run the recovery from the CD to shut it up so it would boot and I could use my system again... taurus

it still doesnt work after "New boot configuration completed"... Any more ideas?

Windows XP because it is based on NT uses a rigid Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). When you change the motherboard, the HAL has fits because it's set to use specifically the hardware that was in the computer when it was installed (most importantly the BIOS firmware interface). One method you might try is to boot from the XP cd and repair your existing install. If I remember right, you have to intially proceed with the install then when setup indicates that it found a previously installed instance of windows it gives you the option to repair it. Essentially it re-installs some essential system files and I think the HAL is part of it, don't worry the repair is not data destructive. That may get you up and running, but I couldn't say one way or the other how stable the system would be. The only long term solution is to do a complete format/reinstall