Help! Old Hard Drive, All new components

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Fr0nt1ine

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Hello,

I have an old hard drive that I cannot wipe or alter and I recently replaced all the parts for the computer (mobo, cpu, psu, gpu, cd drive). I have windows XP installed on it and sensitive information on the hard drive.

1. Is there anything special I will have to do to make sure the parts are recognized and running smoothly with the old hard drive?

2. Can I simply put the new mobo CD in and let it do the work like on a fresh build?

3. Will the old mobo and gpu drivers interfere with installing the new drivers?

4. What do you all recommend so that all I have to do is delete(is it possible?) the old hardware software and install the new hardware software?

Thanks!
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If you are here asking, then you probably don't have the necessary knowledge to do what you are asking. It's not an easy task, in fact it's nearly impossible. Windows XP is not going to be happy with all new hardware like that. It's going to flip out. I've had a few lucky instances where the hardware was similar enough that Windows XP still loaded so I could delete the drivers, but that's only happened once.

What you need to do is just buy a new hard drive, install Windows 7 or 8 onto that new hard drive, run the Windows XP old hard drive as a slave and pull all the data you need off it onto the new one.
 
Simply put, it's XP. XP, unlike Windows 7 or even Vista, rarely handled being transferred to a completely different system without issue. At least in my experience anyway. Even if you removed all of the old drivers and related software, XP can and will act all wonky after a transfer.

If you still have all of the old parts available, hook up the old drive to those old parts, boot into XP and manually uninstall all drivers and related software as leaving those in would increase your chance of issue. You will have to boot into the OS as the drivers often interact with the registry. If you can't boot with the old parts, then you're going to have to accept the higher chance of issue.

With the new motherboard, make sure that SATA mode matches that of the old motherboard. In other words, if the old motherboard had SATA mode set to IDE or Native, then make sure that's the same setting in the new motherboard.

So good luck dude. Though before you do ANYTHING, make sure that you have a backup copy of any sensitive or critical data on another system, NAS, external hard drive, etc. Though what Skillz recommended is the route of the least hassle.
 
If the data is that valuable, keep the hard drive as it is and buy another drive to install Windows on.
Then you can copy the data onto the new drive and keep the old one as a backup.
As already mentioned above.
 
If I just put the new mobo disk in, will it run? The issue I'm having is the client has some cad software on it that isn't a....legit copy. I don't know what he did to make the license work, but I can't alter it.
You guys are saying that I might be able to delete the old drivers to make it work?
 
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