Motherboard replacement = Loss of data?

Hello all,
A friend of mine has an eMachines T2898 and he's been told the power supply died and took the motherboard with it. This being the case, he's searching for a new mobo but I read somewhere that replacing the motherboard with anything other than the OEM spec one will would require losing everything from the harddrive. Is there some way to extract the data some other way from the harddrive? I don't know a lot about computers myself so I wasn't sure what to tell him so any help would be appreciated..preferably the cheapest solution, as we're college students. Thanks a lot, in advance.

 

The data will not necessarily be "lost", however replacing a motherboard with another one of a different brand may cause errors and the only way to fix them is to format and start again. If you know someone who has a PC with the same motherboard brand you can connect to that, or if someone has an external HDD that can be removed from it's case, you can connect yours to the case and backup the data.

 

If you have the OS setup CD (W98, XP, Vista etc) you should be able to replace your Motherboard without any loss of data.
You simply boot your system from the CD after you have replaced the Motherboard, and do a repair install (not a complete new install - that will format your hard drive and you will lose all your data) of the OS.
If you need step by step instructions, we would be happy to walk you through the procedure.