OS / Hardware Upgrade Question

[divine`]

If I were to significantly change my hardware, i'm fairly sure i'd need to reinstall the OS correct?

Could I get a new hard drive, then, install a fresh OS on that, whilst leaving the other hard drive unplugged, then when it's all running, put the old drive back in as a slave and still access all my files? I could then feasibly erase the 'programs' partition as they wouldn't work, but all my photos and films and work would still be on the other ones...

Would save having to mess about with 120GBs worth of DVDs etc.

Or would it be easier to put the new drive in the 'old' system, copy across all the files I want to keep and then do it that way?

 

[Yiuca]

If I were to significantly change my hardware, i'm fairly sure i'd need to reinstall the OS correct?

Could I get a new hard drive, then, install a fresh OS on that, whilst leaving the other hard drive unplugged, then when it's all running, put the old drive back in as a slave and still access all my files? I could then feasibly erase the 'programs' partition as they wouldn't work, but all my photos and films and work would still be on the other ones...

Would save having to mess about with 120GBs worth of DVDs etc.

Or would it be easier to put the new drive in the 'old' system, copy across all the files I want to keep and then do it that way?

Sometimes you can actually still access Windows from an old drive as though normal but with a lot of hardware changes Windows wants to be re-activated, however as you say if you install a fresh copy on a new HDD & put the old one in as slave, you can access the old one via the new Windows & copy all the files over that you want & just delete the old partition & reformat it, then if you wanted you could even install Vista (if you haven't already got it) at a later date on that HDD & be able to boot from either XP or Vista depending on what you want... That's 1 feasible option later on, or you can just use the HDD as pure storage device.