This is probably one of those Buy It and Try It situations, but figured I'd ask before buying to see if anyone had any input on this whether it should work or not.

I tracked down the motherboard my Compaq Presario S6030NX computer use to have: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c00063254#doc for $18

And I thought about putting it back together as the original build with ATHLON XP 2800+ CPU and 1GB RAM, for a project box, but before buying the motherboard I am curious as to if my original recovery set for WINDOWS XP Home would work with this same matching motherboard to the original or if I have to WORRY about something in the Bios Flash etc that will prohibit this? Someone a while back said something about HP/Compaq adding an instruction to the BIOS that had to match that of the original recovery set in order to successfully install. The original board use to show the red COMPAQ Logo and it appears that they used this ASUS motherboard for a bunch of models both the HP Pavilion Line and the Compaq Presario S6000 Line. The $18 motherboard might come up as saying its HP Pavilion vs Compaq Presario.

The original motherboard failed in 2008 with locking up tight and random blue screens after almost 5 years of heavy use. Swapped all hardware, RAM was my first suspect,  and determined it to be the motherboard. Replaced this blown motherboard with a Biostar AM2+ with Athlon x2 4850e 2.5Ghz AM2 CPU and was hoping that keeping with same CPU family, I'd be able to install the recovery set to this system and perform severe driver conversion. BUT the ANTIPIRACY feature of the Recovery Set stated that the hardware does not match and it wouldnt allow further installation. I ended up buying Windows XP Pro and performing a clean build with this new hardware since the XP Home key was useless without matching motherboard. I have since upgraded again 2 years ago to Athlon II x4 620 2.6Ghz, but my RAM limit of 4GB in that board has me upgrading to a AM3+ ATX motherboard to get 16GB support with my existing AM3 quadcore. So all guts are going to get moved to a full height tower for ATX motherboard and this case will be bare and I was thinking why throw away a minitower case with a good Windows XP Home key. Why not fix this system inexpensively to its original hardware configuration, and have a project box running Windows XP Home SP3.

The Windows XP Pro key is tied to my Windows 7 upgrade, so I dont believe I can run XP Pro by itself since it is legally merged license wise which will move to the full tower ATX project.

Thanks for input on this. This would be the very first repair I have ever done with original motherboard make/model used. Generally by the time a system needs a new motherboard technology advanced and why sink money into old tech when you can get newer non-oem parts for the same cost as original oem. In this case its so devalued in age that for less than $30 I might be able to use my XP Home Key and have this box running as original when I got it xmas 2003   
2 methods::

Before the Fact...

After the Fact...

I've used both many times successfully...Thanks for posting this Patio.. Both methods suggested assume that XP Home is already installed to hard drive. Sorry for not stating that this has to be installed to a blank hard drive.

I have used the Repair Installation method before many times, but you need to have a hard drive with XP Home on it to repair. And the situation I had with this Compaq Restore Set was that upon booting from the first CD, it came right up with a message stating that pretty much there is a Hardware Mismatch and it wouldnt allow installation of any data to hard drive and the original 80GB Hard Drive is long gone to perform repair installation against it, so I will have to install fresh to a 160GB IDE that I have which is a bare drive.

 I know that my restore set is good because I pretty much rebuilt my drive fresh 1 or 2 times a year for 5 years and the clean build restores were successful, and the CD's are like new condition so upon installing a Motherboard that is an exact match, the first CD shouldn't pop up with a hardware mismatch I am hoping, but not certain of if the motherboard I buy came out of say a HP Pavilion vs Compaq Presario. The seller has no prior knowledge of what model it came out of and just has a 90-day guarantee on it.

A while back someone at a computer shop told me something about HP/Compaq Restore Sets verifying hardware somehow, and they stated it may have been something hidden in the BIOS Flash when they added their Logo to the ROM and that an instruction on the restore media seeks verification from the ROM to make sure it matches before allowing installation of the OS.

 I also tried to see if I could locate the i386 DIRECTORY on these 7 spanned Restore CD's that I burned when I first bought the computer. The data is compressed and hidden/protected well on the spanned set that keeps it from installing to different hardware. I figured a while back that maybe I could go this route of manually extracting the i386 folder and perform a manual installation without the bloatware, trialware, and wild tangent junk that came with the original image build.

I am thinking I am going to have to Buy and Try and hope that the boards being exact is good enough. Otherwise as a last alternative I was just thinking, I might be able to locate a ghost image I made in the closet of this system a long time ago in one of the archive boxes of mixed stuff, I have and I know that Ghost Images can be bent to work on different hardware from past experience with a Shoretel VoIP Phone System which was a Dell with the Leaky Caps issue which kept locking up and blue screening. I easily migrated the XP Pro to a HP SFF Desktop which was also originally licensed for XP Pro, so no OS licensing rules broken.

I did have to make a change to unbreak the key on the Shoretel VoIP Server Software which keeps an eye on hardware configuration, but how I did it wont be shared as for I dont share information that can be used for illegal hacks as a White Hat and dont want to get booted from CH    . I also made contact with Shoretel after this disclosing what I did and suggesting better antipiracy protection, as White Hat Ethics promote making things better and more secure and to patch out the Grey and Black Hats from using it illegally. They were fine that we were back up and running since we were legally licensed to run their software on one server, but not happy that I figured out how to bypass it as creatively and yet easily as I did in less than 10 minutes without any code patches or software cracks used. I wouldnt have wanted to be the head software engineer that day that caught word that it was too weak in protection. 

 Being what should be an exact match, the ghost image might not complain if the original recovery set doesnt like this board for some reason.

Im going to give it a try and cross my fingers in hope for success!