A couple of days ago my stationary workstation went down.
Through the AC97 audio output my motherboard said: “System failed CPU test”.
I tried different configurations with removed HDD, RAM or video card but the message remained.
Finally I realized that my ASUS P4P800-E deluxe motherboard died after only a year of exploitation.
The good thing is I used my external USB drive box (Aluminum Hard Drive Enclosure: HD360C) to access my hard disk from the broken computer:
With high speed USB 2.0 in action a few minutes later I had everything important on my notebook!
When the broken motherboard was replaced I wondered if it is possible to use current Windows XP installation.
At first run, my system hanged up.
With safe mode I was able to load Windows XP though it took several minutes (!) to load agp440.sys driver.
In Device Manager I saw that PCI based devices are disabled.
There is a system device driver named “Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System“.
Updating it causes reinstallation of all other PCI device drivers.
After this action the system became stable and I was happy that changing a motherboard was a smooth process.