New Motherboard & No Backup

So this is the dilemma im currently faced with.
I sold my motherboard without making any backups.
Ill be receiving my replacement in a few days.

So I was wondering will there be any problems if I just hook my old OS SSD to the new board without formatting, so I can copy everything of importance to another drive, and them format afterwards or wont it work and I am in trouble?

I don't have another pc or any other means to copy the data from the old OS.

Current OS ssd running WIN 10 64bit up to date.

Doom5003 said:

So this is the dilemma im currently faced with.
I sold my motherboard without making any backups.
Ill be receiving my replacement in a few days.

So I was wondering will there be any problems if I just hook my old OS SSD to the new board without formatting, so I can copy everything of importance to another drive, and them format afterwards or wont it work and I am in trouble?

Click to expand...

Yes and no. Usually you can get away with this, but you really really should do a fresh install because all kinds of crazyness will eventually start to happen from the leftovers of the previous build.

Doom5003 said:

I don't have another pc or any other means to copy the data from the old OS.

Current OS ssd running WIN 10 64bit up to date.

Click to expand...

Yes you do. Burn a linux live cd to a thumb drive and boot to that, copy your data. The objective shouldn't really be to save your installed programs, but your pst's and critical data.

if its an rma and you get the same board back it should just fire up. if its different you can load windows on another drive and then connect your original drive as secondary. then you can back up your data. if you don't have access to another system to get a live cd image this is aboot your only option if it doesn't "drop in".

Of course you're gonna have to reactivate Windows....

There are going to be a lot of ifs here.

If you are using a vastly different board and your old windows just won't boot. (if the case is your old MB died and your replacing it with the same MB I doubt there will be any issue just plugging in and turning it on)
If you only have the one hard drive and planned to reuse it.
If you have a friend who is willing to burn you a Live Linux DVD or USB stick.

You could boot Linux off that and then copy your important files to an external or something.

If you have no external to copy to... you could resize your windows partition. Create a new "backup" partition. Then copy whatever you want to save there.... then reinstalling Windows (or Linux) after deleting the old part. After that you could keep the backup part, or copy that where you want delete it and then go back to resize the new one. [I wouldn't go this route unless all the above ifs are hard IFS... resizing in general works just fine but there is a small chance you kill the drive and loose everything]

Other suggestions in the thread are all valid as well... it really depends on which ifs apply. lol

PS one more possibility... IF (again) you have a new drive your intending to install your new windows on, you could purchase a USB hard drive enclosure and plug your old drive into there and use like an external hdd. (of course if you do have a new drive destined for a new install you can of course just plug it into the board as a slave and copy what you want.)

In my experience Windows 10 is pretty good about booting with new hardware. May have to reactivate after but it will most likely boot. Worst case you can use a Linux live CD to get files onto an external drive.

Simmonz said:

In my experience Windows 10 is pretty good about booting with new hardware. May have to reactivate after but it will most likely boot. Worst case you can use a Linux live CD to get files onto an external drive.

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2nded. Ever since Vista (I think), it's not necessary to reinstall the OS from scratch after moving to a different board. At minimum you'll need to update some drivers (might be necessary to boot into safe mode first to remove everything from the device manager) and reactivate Windows, and that should be it.
Before you do all that, I'd still get a spare drive or an external, burn a copy of Clonezilla and make an image just in case if shit does hit the fan.

GushpinBob said:

2nded. Ever since Vista (I think), it's not necessary to reinstall the OS from scratch after moving to a different board. At minimum you'll need to update some drivers (might be necessary to boot into safe mode first to remove everything from the device manager) and reactivate Windows, and that should be it.
Before you do all that, I'd still get a spare drive or an external, burn a copy of Clonezilla and make an image just in case if shit does hit the fan.

Click to expand...

Hmmm, I don't know whether I'd go that far....

...Windows 7 really didn't like complete hardware swaps, in fact Windows 7 had enough trouble finding drivers for hardware on a clean install of the operating system.