Actually, I do not need to do a restore. I have an Emachine with a
good Sempron CPU 3000+ but a bad K7MNF-64 MOBO. Since the CPU & CPU
fan, HDD, FDD, PSU, have all tested okay, I thought I would resurrect
the Emachine with a new MOBO for my daughter. I would install a fresh
system & apps.
The board seemed quite good in the reviews I read, what with all its
on-board capabilities. But it does seem to be quite in demand, since
it seems so unavailable.
Maybe my better bet would be to find an ATX MOBO compatible with my
CPU and with all (or at least most) on-board features such as video,
audio, LAN, IEEE 1394, AGP.
If you plan to use the eMachine power supply (if it's even
good still, emachine was notorious for failing PSU for
awhile...), make sure the replacement board uses same power
supply rail for the CPU (onboard CPU VRM supply subcircuit)
as a minimally sized PSU may have insufficient power reserve
on the other rail (12V vs 5V, one or the other is derived to
power CPU).
In the case of the K7MNF-64, it appears to use 12V for this,
as evidenced by the inclusion of the 4-pin 12V connector on
the board. Most boards do use 12V for this at the point of
nForce2 and thereafter, but a few common and reasonable
quality boards didn't such as a few Asus, Biostar, and a few
lower quality PCChips and maybe their rebrands.
One thing that always concerns me with replacing a board
with same thing again is what the cause was for the original
board failure and if the replacement board will have the
same vulnerability.