Question : Windows 2008 won't boot in new hardware

today, my test server bit the dust - system board issue - and is not worth fixing. I was in the middle of doing some work with Exchange 2010.
I took another box, popped out the hard drive from the old unit and installed it into another system. I was hoping I would have some sort of repair utility to fix it all up nicely. Not the case. Eventually, I gave up and reinstalled from scratch and am back up again.

So my question is...is there a way to recover from this type of problem with Windows 2008?

Here's what I tried and nothing worked. (Restarted after each command)

SFC /scannow
sfc /SCANNOW /OFFBOOTDIR=d:\ /OFFWINDIR=d:\windows
StartRep.exe
bootsect.exe /nt52 D:
bcdedit /set {default} device partition=C: <ENTER>
bcdedit /set {default} osdevice partition=C: <ENTER>
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device partition=C: <ENTER>
I gave up here but in the future, I would like to know if there is a way to recover from this hardware problem

Answer : Windows 2008 won't boot in new hardware

IN THEORY, 2008 is very hardware independent.  However, I believe problems can still occur if any of the following is true:
1) you switch processor architecture (go from x64 to an x86 only system)
2) you switch processor architecture (go from AMD to intel or vice versa)
3) don't have necessary disk controller drivers installed that support the new disk controller prior to making such a transfer.

If you had done this in a virtual machine, it would have been easy to switch.

In addition, knowing the error messages you received and the hardware you went from and to would have been helpful to understand why things didn't work.