Just a quick question to all. I will be upgrading my mobo, cpu and graphics tommorrow and I'm putting my exising HDD into the new system. Will I be able to get away with NOT re-installing windows and the other software?? It would save me alot of time but I dont know if it is possible. My primary HDD is an 8 GB IDE and the secondary is a 250 GB SATA. Will I benefit from swapping the drives around and having the SATA as primary or are the speeds around the same?

Just trying to save time really

Cheers

You will have to reinstall windows, there is no way around it as the current install of XP will not have any drivers installed for the new motherboard IDE/SATA controller. it will try and boot but then blue screen part way through.

Cheers for your help. I didn't think it would work, but thought I'd ask anyway

To be fair, it would work in safe mode and you could potentially bodge it to get it working by installing the new drivers. But, a new sata drive with a fresh install of windows will be so much quicker that I'd go with that anyway.

It may be a pain reinstalling stuff, but it's the cleaner and better way. You'll benefit from it in the long run

The perfect time for spring cleaning imho, a re-install would be a good thing

the M$ dance....

the M$ dance....

:confused:

Oh, you mean this one?

Whatever rocks your boat, I guess

You might be able to get it working after a fashion, but it'll never be as good as a new, clean install.

When doing bare metal recovery tests (as part of my job) I've found that you'll occasionally get away with pre-loading every driver that comes with the new motherboard before you make the changeover, but it's never the most stable install.

Phil

It is probably well worth while putting the active copy of windows on the SATA drive. If you really don't want to do an install from clean, try Norton Ghost or similar to copy the OS to the new drive.

Partition the SATA into 2, and use a part of it to carry the complete system copy. If all screws up you can boot from Ghost system CD and try again after restoring.