Well, I am finally getting my new FS computer on Tuesday. I have thought about the best way to get everything transferred from my old one to the new one. I plan on doing a clean install of FS9, obviously, but I have all that scenery and all the aftermarket aircraft and AFCAD.My current thought is to just temporarily install my old hard drive on the new system and copy aircraft, scenery, texture and add-on scenery folders over the newly installed folders. This seems quicker than reinstalling everything one by one. Any thoughts on this method?Also, any efficient alternative methods that I might consider, or perhaps a thread addressing this?Thanks in advance for any help.Wilson

Wilson,I was recently faced with your problem of transferring files to a new computer and what I ended up doing was spending about $60.00 for an USB File Transfer Cable and its included file transfer software - brand name was Manhattan and available at a local computer store. Once the USB cable was connected between the two machines and the software loaded and launched on each machine you are presented with a horizontally split Windows Explorer type screen on both systems that you may then simply drag and drop files or folders from one system to the other. There may be other ways to accomplish this task but I found this method to be very efficient and fast to transfer information from system to system.

"My current thought is to just temporarily install my old hard drive on the new system and copy aircraft, scenery, texture and add-on scenery folders over the newly installed folders."This should be the easiest way. Just set the old drive to Slave and the one in the new system to Master and you should be able to see both from inside Windows. You might be able to just copy over some stuff, while other things will probably require a re-install. Especially payware stuff that was installed with its special installer will require reinstall. Also, keep track of your .gau gauge files, textures in the main fs9 texture folder etc. so that you don't forget some required files.If there's room for it, you may want to keep both harddrives installed. You'll get more storage space, obviously, but you can also use the old drive for backups (if one drive fails you still have the important data on the other).

Thanks for the suggestion, John. I will look for the USB data link. That would be even easier than sticking the old drive in the new compueter. Guess I could also set the two computers up as a network.Also, I had forgotten about guages! Thanks for the reminder, Jimmi.By the way, new system essentials are:Athlon 64 3400+Gigabyte GA-K8NPROCorsair XMS 1 GB PC-3200 DDR400Radeon 9800PRO 128 MB (I know, should have sprung for 256)Maxtor 160 GB SATA etc., etc.Wilson

Do you got many harddrives? Why can

I wouldn't spend 60$ for a USB data link cable if you just want to use it one time to copy data from the old hard drive to the new PC. Just do it as you wrote in your first post, and if your new drive is big enough (which it usually will be), you could simply copy EVERYTHING from the old drive to the new drive into a directory called something like "OldData". This way you can easily access the old data even after a few weeks (in case you forgot something). After some time you can delete the directory and make space for new stuff.As for the FS installation: I would reinstall it from scratch. I'm never sure which programs may add information to the registry or some hidden directory that I would forget to copy over. Also my experience is that over the time I install a lot of sceneries and even aircrafts that I never use more than one time. So you could see it as an opportunity to clean your FS installation up a little bit... :) .CheersAndreas