Motherboard failure - advice for starting over?

[conman0321]

Power surge smoked my motherboard last week. HDD is fine, but installing a new motherboard (and CPU) causes Win7 to think it needs a new license (boot halts at UEFI).

I have a 2008 DVD of WIn 7 but don't even know if it'll download updates, let alone allow me to bootstrap to get back my recordings.

Any advice for getting the old girl back up and running? Or should I throw in the towel, return the CableCARD and submit to the tyranny of Fios' STB?

System:
former Win 7 OS
J4125B-ITX integrated motherboard & CPU
16 GB RAM
1TB SSD
Ceton PCIex2 4 tuner CableCARD tuner

[dkrom]

I can tell you that you can update windows 7 from a fresh install. I just did it, but I don’t know off hand how far back the updates go. Probably back to the point MS decided to end support. There was a glitch that I had where the Win7 version I had was so old it couldn’t contact the update servers, so I googled the problem and downloaded an update from MS.

[unclebun]

If Windows is capable of finding enough drivers to boot, it will, but with a warning that you need to reactivate. So if you can't get past the UEFI, the drivers are too different and the hard drive doesn't have drivers that can work with the new hardware. You can often get such a system to work by using the Windows installation disk/media to perform a repair installation.

[CZ Eddie]

A license issue is easy to get around.
Do you have any recordings you don't want to lose?
Because if you do, I don't think you'll be able to watch them if you reinstall Windows & WMC.

[mercalia]

there mist be lots of windows 7 pcs with valid licences out there that are just scrap. look on ebay for such?