The challenge is that if I put the new board in and boot it up, I know it won't even get there. The HD will show up as not there because my mirror RAID drivers will choke it first. I could bypass that by using only one drive. But it has been my experience that I won't be able to get far enough in to delete all the drivers and such.
I need to be able to do it without booting to the drive. I can slave it to another computer, but then I don't know the name of the file to delete that contains the system properties info.
On a mirror RAID, there are two identical drives. They can be separated and one drive can be slaved and the data pulled off.
I know this for fact because thats how I salvaged my data on the last computer that went down. I was running dual mirrored RAID's on a pair of 200's and a pair of 80's on the same machine. I slaved one of each, read them as a single drive and pulled all my data off intact. In fact, I also used MS Backup as well in case I missed any files. I since restored that backup to an alternate directory to offer myself the opportunity to grab stuff as needed.
Actually, let me clarify "slaved" I ran them as a secondary master.
Yea, sure you can pull the files off of them. You know, if you dont want to try and repair the board, the cap debacle aside, there is a chance if something went wrong the board could take something out with it. There are other 478 boards around with the same chipset. The chipset controls the IDE and Sata. So it would matter about the sound/USB/ and so on driver. As long as it was the same chipset drivers it should boot up just fine. Just another idea.