Safe to go when upgrading?

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Hi all,

I am currently going to do an upgrade on my fathers PC, changing the Case, PSU, CPU, Mobo and graphics card. And I was wondering, do I need to back up my dads HDD's? If I do it will be rather annoying as is it really needed?
 
well if you change the mobo you will probably need to reinstall windows. I would back up all his docs, pics, music etc and be ready to reinstall his programs.
 
well if you change the mobo you will probably need to reinstall windows. I would back up all his docs, pics, music etc and be ready to reinstall his programs.

Hmm, annoying, very annoying, his hard drive is like a minefield, everything is scattered everywhere, so this may be hard to do... I'll back it up, put it on another Hard Drive, and test if it'll work without a reinstall, if it does then great, if not, I'm going to have a long time fixing it all...
 
Oh yea, and so you guys know, the PC is like 10 to 11 years old, something stupidly high like that, so his hard drive is like, everywhere since 10 to 11 years of loading crap onto it in random places.
 
To be honest its always a good idea to reinstall after a hardware change anyway becuase all the old drivers and things are loaded for the old hardware and now the new ones are going on top.
 
To be honest its always a good idea to reinstall after a hardware change anyway becuase all the old drivers and things are loaded for the old hardware and now the new ones are going on top.

That is a very good point, thanks for that, didn't think of it.
 
When changing the motherboard I tend to do a reinstall :)

OK, I shall do that.

I would also replace the old Old HDD, if its 10 - 11 years old then its going to be a slow IDE which is seriously going to hold back the new system.

Yea, it's a IDE one, I've gotten him a bigger HDD than his 80GB one, I ripped apart his External HDD he bought to back up stuff, although it didn't work, I'll use my PC for transferring from one to another as my PC is wayy faster. I cut into my hand getting that HDD too, I slid my finger along a bit of it to rip the case of and it sliced deep into my finger :(
 
I would also replace the old Old HDD, if its 10 - 11 years old then its going to be a slow IDE which is seriously going to hold back the new system.


This.

Unless a hard drive is relatively new there is absolutely no point re-using it when drives are so cheap to buy now.

The best backup possible is to not do anything to the old drive.

Once the new build is up and running you have the option of putting the old drive TEMPORARILY back into the system and it then becomes a live online drive from which you can build directory structures and transfer data to the new drive.

If the old drive is relatively small with respect to the new drive(s) you can even do a complete copy of the old drive to a directory on the new drive as an extra level of data security - a pre upgrade reference.

This really will make life much easier for you.

Edit: Re: the post above - you DESTROYED his data backup - what on earth are you thinking!
 
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I would definitely back up - just because of the age of the hard drive, alone. (Just unplugging the power and IDE cable of a hard drive of that age would make me nervous - if it wasn't my drive.)

That is an old drive and just moving it into essentially a different machine with a new psu could cause it to break. I'm not saying it will break but placing very old drives in new builds can be a risk. Just unplugging such an old drive may give it an excuse not to work again - i've had it happen to me once when upgrading an old computer for a family member. I'm sure it would have quite happily carried on working had it not been disturbed - but as soon as it was placed in a new rig, as a back up drive, it died. (I had to do the deep freeze trick to get some of the data back that wasn't already backed up - not guaranteed to work btw.)

It's always best practice to back up when doing a motherboard upgrade - no matter how annoying, as it's way more annoying and expensive if you lose your precious data.

Good luck

Plec
 
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