moving boot drive over to new barebones - windows advice?

[indextwo]

I currently have a 120gb Seagate sitting in my Shuttle XPC, however it’s now time for me to upgrade all of my hardware, so I’m about to purchase a new Shuttle barebones, processor and RAM. I currently have Windows XP SP2 installed (all upgraded via updates over a three year period from an original SP1 install). I kinda figured that I would be able to put my Seagate straight into my new Shuttle, but a friend suggested that Windows might go “Hold on - all of the hardware has changed! I don’t like this one little bit!” and not want to run.

Someone also suggested setting my IDE controller to Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE controller, but I have *no* idea what this means, since I'm a bit dim when it comes to hardware.

Does anyone know if this is the case, or if I’ll be able to switch my drive straight out and into my new setup?

Thanks for your help!

 

[indextwo]

heh, I run a pretty tight ship, but I know what you mean.

My main concern with a clean install is that my drive is currently partitioned and contains absolutely everything, ever (including my entire album collection MP3'd, 20gb of work, and about 2000 fonts). I have got a 300gb external Seagate, but with only USB 1.1 ports on my machine, it's going to take days to back everything up.

Will I be able to do an install without wiping my HD clean? I only ask because the last time I ran a repair to clean the registry on my girlfriend's old PC, it did a factory default install and wiped 3 years of university work clean (fortunately she'd graduated by then...)