mother board replacement

[Jeffrey Joos]

Hello
I have a surface rt that I am trying to fix for a friend. It would not turn on other then the surface logo and showing a battery then shuts down. I took it apart and unplugged the battery ribbon. With it all plugged back together the tablet turned on but is showing there is no battery. The plug on the mother board that the battery is plugged into is broken off the board. I hate to think it but I think I broke it off the board My question is if I replace the mother board will all the software have to be reinstalled? Not sure if the mother board is also the hard drive? I found new boards on ebay for alittle over $50 but have no access to software.
thanks
Jeff

 

[malberttoo]

Hello
I have a surface rt that I am trying to fix for a friend. It would not turn on other then the surface logo and showing a battery then shuts down. I took it apart and unplugged the battery ribbon. With it all plugged back together the tablet turned on but is showing there is no battery. The plug on the mother board that the battery is plugged into is broken off the board. I hate to think it but I think I broke it off the board My question is if I replace the mother board will all the software have to be reinstalled? Not sure if the mother board is also the hard drive? I found new boards on ebay for alittle over $50 but have no access to software.
thanks
Jeff

Hi Jeffrey, welcome to the forum.

I believe the solid state drive is indeed soldered to the motherboard. Hopefully someone will come along and correct me if I'm wrong.

If you were to somehow replace the mobo and relocate the solid state drive from the old to the new mobo, I do believe you would see Windows updating some various drivers and firmware, but I don't think you'd have to actually reinstall Windows or any software.

 

[GreyFox7]

If you know the machine name and user account password you can reinstall it with the same name (although that's not actually a requirement as you can sync with settings from another machine). Settings and Installed Apps are all synced to the cloud so when you setup with the same account it will offer to sync with a known computer.

It will also ask you to verify the account so if its configured to email another email address for verification then you would need access to that to get the verification code to proceed.

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en...ervice-and-recovery/downloadablerecoveryimage

I just went through this with a Win 8.1 computer I was Resetting. The Desktop and all is set the same, the Store Apps are setup with stubs... (there is an icon/tile but its not installed until first use) In my case it was a laptop so Desktop Apps are all gone and have to be reinstalled manually but there's no such thing in RT.

Now back to the original problem... which could be the battery... if so you are zol... if its not the battery then you are lucky... assuming you can get it back together.