New Mother Board and System

[RickM]

Hello,
Thank you for taking the time to read this message.
It has been a few years now since I have built my own system.
I do not think the old days of FDISk exist anymore, I could be wrong.

I am thinking of building another system, this Pentium 4 3.00GHz system is getting a little tired.

I have a hardrive that is filled with a lot of cool stuff. My question is :
If I build a new system Mobo/RAM/Video/ etc. will my hardrive bomb out on me and not work with the new system ?
It has been a while and I am getting a little rusty with the new stuff.
Thank you for your time and any information will be appreciated.

Rick

 

[Essex]

I do a lot of upgrades and new builds. What size is your old HD? Is it SATA? Smallest HD installed here in SA is now 160GB and SATA is the option.

What I do as basic now is install 160 GB system HD, backed up by a 250GB min data drive for Movies/Music/Data etc.

If you are serious about upgrade that's gonna last you another 5 years or so and handle all the desirable stuff that makes a computer worth owning, why not go Core Duo min 2.3 GHz rather than single core?

Put your old HD into semi-retirement and annexe it as another optional "slave" drive for accessing your cool stuff. You'll need to have the installation discs for your OS and programs for the new drive.

One trick I often do is an image backup of the old hard drive and do a restore onto the new drive. There's a lot of ducking and diving to set it up, but the benefits are often a nice way of moving house and keeping the furniture to come with.

I always check to keep the MOBO's old/new chipsets in the family, eg. VIA on old ... VIA on new, so I get minimum upsets on sound/video driver compatibility. New MOBO will come with install disc anyway.

When the system fires up and boots into XP I do a check disk that sorts out any loose ends on the reboot.

I see you are a regular here for problem solving so I am sure you are well capable of climbing in and giving yourself a worthwhile upgrade to drive around with the some of the newer models LOL.
And just for fun you could safely check your old hard drive (switched to master with the new one safely unplugged from power and IDE strap to se if it boots up (ahh... the old faithful as it used to be... yeah )

Rebuilds are fun and very rewarding, like pimping ya ride.

 

[Rage_3K_Moiz]

Your HDD will most likely be IDE, which is not a big problem since almost all motherboards come with IDE and SATA ports.
As for your upgrade, if you need any help, just give me a budget and your exact location in a private message or in this thread and I'll see what I can dig up for you.