I want to upgrade and save my hard drive's contents

Hey guys.. my first time on this forum I heard this is the best when it come to tech support! well I got this big trouble that just happend to me!!! my recent PC died on me with a bad mobo I have been searching all over the net for a similar board and its impossible to find! it my spec was as follows MSI board with G41-ICH7 chipsets core 2 quad processor 4gb hyper X rams DDR2..all the boards with same chipsets are DDR3 so meaning I have to buy new RAMS with these boards I wanted to step up to the newer processors and DDR3 but the thing is I dont have back up of my HDD and EVERYTHING on it is VERY important and I dont want to format anything! my question was..is there a way of keeping everything but still upgrade to a newer system? guys sorry for my bad english..not my native language and I hope you guys understand what im trying to say and get some help from the pros!

Thanks!
 
Well if you built a new system you'd need a new hard drive (or Linux CD) to boot from and you can get the data from your old hard drive that way.
 
Are you absolutely certain its the motherboard that is bad? How did you come to the conclusion it was the motherboard?
 
Yes, besides the computer failure, I'm not sure why the HD is your concern. I don't see a reason why you can't make your upgrades then get your data back form the old HD - assuming nothing is wrong with it...and even then. Don't format anything.

Only issue I could foresee is if you try and boot from that hard drive, since you changed your motherboard and other components, windows might not like it and you will have to contact Microsoft.
 
Easiest way to accomplish this is to buy a new HDD\SSD for your new system. Install Windows onto the new HDD\SSD and then install all your hardware drivers and such. After you have everything up and running, connect your old hard drive to the new system as a slave drive, then copy all the necessary data over to your new drive. Once you have everything backed up to the new drive, format the old one and use it for extra storage.
 
Hi nicor6, If you built a new pc but used your old hard drive, I don't think it would boot from it, because the part numbers are changed, it would fail the Microsoft 'boot-time' validation test.
But as slamscraper said, you could use a new motherboard (with a new or used 'C' drive with fresh Windows O/S installed) and plug in your old hard drive as 'D' and then you can read all the data on it.
Also if you have to buy new DDR3 RAM, the prices are very low, see;
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=2gb ddr3&tag=mh0a9-21&index=aps&hvadid=479674310&ref=pd_sl_4950j8nuk0_e
 
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