Hi GuysI am about to swap out my Asus Sandy Bridge MB in the next couple of weeks as I have 5 hard drives and do not want the Sata 3 port to fail. I have Windows 7 64 bit on my C Drive with about 240GB of programs and I have FSX on my D drive. I was thinking that I would like to start a fresh installation of FSX but try and keep my main C drive and programs the same. I looked at Acronis True Image and it looks fairly simple, so tell me if I am wrong I should un install FSX then make an image of my C drive to one of the other storage drives I have, swap out the motherboard and then boot into the image I have saved. My question is do I re format both C+D drive and then move the image over later to C as I want that to remain my main installion or is there an easier way... Acronis looks as though it is setup to work as if your hard drive fails but in this case I would like to keep using the same drive...Thnaks for any help or if anyone has any tips for a better program as I have not bought Acronis yet that would be great....Hamish

I will be interested in what some people say for this thread. I started the RMA process with Newegg for my replacement P8P67 Deluxe. I have Windows on my C drive and FSX/FS2004(+addons) on another. I would like to image the two drives so I can snap back to my current setup. I have next to 0 experience in backing up though.

Hi GuysI am about to swap out my Asus Sandy Bridge MB in the next couple of weeks as I have 5 hard drives and do not want the Sata 3 port to fail. I have Windows 7 64 bit on my C Drive with about 240GB of programs and I have FSX on my D drive. I was thinking that I would like to start a fresh installation of FSX but try and keep my main C drive and programs the same. I looked at Acronis True Image and it looks fairly simple, so tell me if I am wrong I should un install FSX then make an image of my C drive to one of the other storage drives I have, swap out the motherboard and then boot into the image I have saved. My question is do I re format both C+D drive and then move the image over later to C as I want that to remain my main installion or is there an easier way... Acronis looks as though it is setup to work as if your hard drive fails but in this case I would like to keep using the same drive...Thnaks for any help or if anyone has any tips for a better program as I have not bought Acronis yet that would be great....Hamish

Dead easy if you have a second drive.With True Image, you can just make a backup of your C drive to another drive, and make either a bootable CD or USB Flash Drive. Connect the new Hard Disk, and boot from the aforementioned CD or USB drive, and copy the backup onto the new disk.Doesn't take long at all, and is totally foolproof.

So what you want is to have the same partitions in different drives? If you simply want to use the same drives you don't even need Acronis or anything, simply plug your drives to the new mobo and you're good to go.If you want to swap drives, you will need to figure out where the MBR (Master Boot Record, a small system partition that Windows uses to determine what operating systems are installed) ,and make sure it's in one of the disks you install in the new setup or it won't boot unless you create a new one and run a Win boot repair with the W7 installation CD/DVDCloning then a partition to a different disk with Acronis is very simple

Sorry, so if I want to keep everything the same, I do not need to make an image at all. I thought if you took out the motherboard and replaced it you would have to start from scratch at least with the main OS. When the new board is replaced do you just go to the bios and direct it to boot from the hard drive you have the OS on? Wow this could be much simpler than I thought!!Please let me know if this is not right though..... :Straight Face:

That's right most of the times. Win 7 will load the drivers for your new chipset and it will work right away. You might need to install some other stuff manually (in my case, the USB 3.0 drivers) but you should be fine

Yup, I went from my i3 setup to the i5 2500k as above, just had to install some chipset drivers when Windows 7 booted.

Thanks Guys, sounds pretty easy!!Waiting for my new Asus MB now......Hamish