My sister has an Emachine, and the mobo went out. We installed another mobo, turned it on, went into BIOS, and going smoothly. Reboot, install the Emachine restore disks, and it gets to the enter Windows registration key, which is automatic in the software. It hangs up for a moment and says that the key is invalid. We tried calling emachine, and they gave a new key, but it is saying that key is invalid. My guess is that it has something to do with the mobo, but never ran into this problem before. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Is the new mother board the same make and model as the old one? If not then the eMachines restore CD will be loading thew wrong hardware (HAL/DAC) and chipset drivers.

Hmm.. would have thought windows would have installed correctly though. I usually install windows on a fresh system first, then put the drivers in.

Is there any way to remedy this, short of buying a new OS?

You didn't answer my question. Is the new mother board the same make and model as the old one?

If yes then the restore CD should work. If it doesn't then Emachines needs to fix this for you.

If not, then you may have problems, but I would think it should still install okay and accept the product key.

In either case, Emachines is where your solution lies. You need to push them to make good.

Hehe sorry, not sure who the manufacturer is on the old one, but I can tell it's not the same one. They said they could send us some new disks, but we're not sure if that will fix the problem or not. Would hate to spend that much and have it not work. Thanks for the help, will try to wipe and reinstall again and see if it goes any better this time.