Hardware upgrade -- Windows 7 migration question

[Cerulean]

Greetings,

My Gigabyte EP45-DS3R went out today. I have checked around, and nobody sells this board any more. That means I have to get a DDR3 board, which means I need to get new DDR3 RAM, which also means I need to get a new CPU.

Question: when/if I get new hardware, do I just need to run Windows 7 repair to get the OS working? Or do I have to do a complete install from scratch?

 

[Lord Nassirbannipal]

The best choice is to do a complete reinstall.

 

[tlmiller]

The best choice is to do a complete reinstall.

Yup, considering how much you've changed, best option is just a fresh install. If you have information on the old installation you need to get off, I'd say get a ubuntu disc and boot to it, and copy everything off to a USB drive, then do a fresh install of windows.

 

[Cerulean]

Yup, considering how much you've changed, best option is just a fresh install. If you have information on the old installation you need to get off, I'd say get a ubuntu disc and boot to it, and copy everything off to a USB drive, then do a fresh install of windows.

No worries about that. This migration will also beg me to purchase a 2TB EARX and a 120-128GB SSD (have only enough room for $300 to $400-worth of HDD-related or "other" stuff).

Here in this thread I am looking at a $120 16GB RAM kit, a $620 CPU, and a $320 motherboard. I'm already up to $1060 -- doesn't leave me a whole lot more of room for HDD upgrade. See my signature -- I have been meaning to replace my 500GB and 1TB with 2TB EARS/EARX HDDs. Now, should I decide to pull the trigger on a yet-to-be-finalized plan of what to purchase, I also have the opportunity to completely re-organize all my harddrives since it seems I have to install Windows 7 from scratch, which means no program is linked to any of these harddrives, which means I can freely sift stuff around without worrying of stuff breaking.

Was contemplating on purchasing two 2TB EARX drives, but those things are about $150/ea. A 120GB OCZ SSD that could do 512 MB/s sustained read/write on SATA-III (6Gbps) and massive 30k write IOPs and 80k read IOPs would be supreme for an OS C: drive. A 2TB EARX wouldn't be bad, but it would result in partitioning for a C and D, and I would like to avoid that on an HDD with a tremendous storage capacity.

If I go that route, down the road I would need to only get two more 2TB EARX HDDs and then the plan (for then/now) would be complete and no more upgrades would be necessary for a while. There is a lot of stuff I need to compress/delete from my existing 500GB/1TB/2TB setup.. might free a lot of space.

 

[ThreeDee]

i went from a P35 Q6600, 8gb DDR2 to an LGA1155 i2500k (now i2600k) 16GB DDR3 .. without reinstalling win7.. no problems, every thing is running great..

just had to re-activate windows is all ..

best bet is to do a fresh install though .. but I haven't had a lick of trouble myself

 

[JBark]

Yeah, the way Windows 7 loads drivers, there's really no point in doing a fresh install unless you really want to. Since it's an image based install from the start, every driver it ships with is available on the drive, and it just loads up what it detects. The only problem I've run across is usually related to odd storage drivers (like old AMD or nForce SATA), but even then that's easily fixed by enabling the generic MS services like PCIIDE and MSAHCI before swapping to the new hardware, then installing the proper drivers.

Just last week I swapped the drive from an ancient Athlon X2 system into a Core i5 system, and nary a glitch. Detect new hardware, reboot, install drivers for hardware not detected first pass, reboot, activate, done. I've probably done a dozen similar swaps over the past year here at work, all have worked perfectly.

Just make sure your SATA mode on the new mobo matches the old one (AHCI, Native, IDE, whatever), and it should boot up just fine.