X230 Motherboard Windows 8 Replacement Help!

Greetings,

I just replaced the MB on my X230 with a used replacement I bought off of Fleabay. Dog+cup of Coffee: 1, Laptop: 0. I tried to save the MB with an alcohol bath, but no luck (got the 1-3-3-1 beep sequence, so I swapped in a new board). MB is the same processor (3340M), direct swap. Here's the detailed sequence of events:

-fired up laptop, wouldn't boot, immediate error message (wireless card not supported). I tried to install a new wireless card while I had it open. Oops. Changed out wireless card to previous one.

-fired up again, success! It did give a brief "new hardware" message, then booted up just fine. Only issue, no wireless. The wireless slider button was greyed out, couldn't toggle it, couldn't turn on wireless w/the function keys. Decided to re-boot, go into bio to see if I can change the wireless settings.

-turned on again, got the Windows pale blue screen telling me that Windows is having problems, auto-diagnose doesn't work. Tried that a few times, no luck.

The OS on this machine was originally W7, and I bought the upgrade to W8 via the upgrade path. The W7 was a clean install on my own SSD. I actually tossed in the original HD which still has W7, booted right up (but again, no wireless).

So, that's where I am now. Is there any chance I can somehow fix this w/o doing new install of W8? And, if I do have to do a W8 install, any way to do this without buying a new copy? One more thing to add is that I do have another functioning computer, so I can pull stuff off of the SSD. I have no recovery media, but I do have the drive.

Any help is greatly appreciated!!

 

Do you have the license that you used to upgrade from W7 to W8? If not, my guess is that you'll need another license in order to get W8 up and running.

I'm stumped with the wireless card bit, though. Can you boot a "live" Linux USB and see whether the card is functional there?

Good luck.

 

I've searched for the upgrade information, and while I have the confirmation e-mail, that's all I have.. If I can't find a way to repair W8 on that machine, I think I'll probably do a clean install of W7 on that machine since I still have the key and keep that a W7 machine. While there are a few W8 things I like, I honestly don't think it's worth the $$ just for those few things.

At this point, I'm thinking the wifi thing is a driver issue vs. a motherboard issue. In thinking about it, I was using a different wifi card on the machine when I had the original HDD, so I think I can get that to work...hopefully.

Thanks for the response, we'll see how it goes!

 

Just to close the loop on this in case anyone else stumbled across this thread when doing a motherboard repair, I was able to get it working with the W8 hard drive I was using. I do think that it was a driver issue related to the wireless card that was causing the problem, so I do think that trying to boot up with that non-authorized wireless card is what caused the issue. Turns out it was not a "Windows Authentication" issue.

I went to the advanced troubleshooting settings during the startup failr and selected the option to "boot without driver authentication" or something like that, and it started right up. I reinstalled the drivers for the wireless card, and wireless is now working. Of course, I haven't re-started the system, so I'm not sure it's "100% fixed". I have a few things I need to do first, just in case I can't re-start--but, all seems well.

 

Thanks for the update. A success story is always a good one to hear...:thumbsup: