Hello, I am considering an upgrade to my PC this spring. I would be going from a I7 930 (o/c at 4.2ghz) to either a Ivy or Sandy Bridge system. I would only be changing the following parts on my PC:

 

CPU

Motherboard

Memory

CPU Cooler

GPU

 

I have 3 hard drives, all 7200 old fashioned platter HDDs, dedicated to the OS, FSX, and Storage respectively. I hate installing from scratch, I even avoided an upgrade this past year (missing my every 2 year upgrade schedule) because I had FSX running just fine and it takes forever to install all my addons, and FPS/performance seems ok. However, last month I had a virus infection, and was forced to rebuild the OS and FSX, and have just completed that task. I also learned a valuable lesson about proper backups, and have invested in a USB external drive and Acronis backup software to keep disk images of my OS and FSX drives.

 

I was curious to know if I were to just install the above new components, while keeping the hard drives as is, can I just boot into the new upgraded system without having to reformat the hard drives and reinstall the OS and FSX? I imagine I may need to re validate Windows, but the file structures/OS registry should remain exactly the same save for some hardware changes. Is it possible to remain pure plug and play, or would I need to erase the drives and use Acronis to transfer replacement disk images?

 

Basically, thanks to the keeping of hard drive images, I am more willing to upgrade the hardware because if my theory of just transferring the hard drives to the new system doesn't pan out, I could just simply use Acronis to transfer disk images to the new system. I would love to just drop the HDDs into the new system without using Acronis to move images around, and want to know if this is a feasible solution.

 

Thanks for your attention!

A good budget build would look something like this:

 

Intel Core i5 3570K

GTX 660Ti

Corsair H100i

Asus P8Z77-V

8GB GSkill Ripjaws DDR3 2400

Hi A.J:

 

1).The only thing that you really want to install from scratch, is your C: drive, and that means a full format, with a clean install, re-registering Windows - but doing all this will break all of the links to all of the applications which have registry entries. You would need to reinstall these. If FSX is on one of the other drives, then you can use the Flight1 Registry Repair tool to re-make the link, but other than that there will be lots of installing to do. The other part of that reinstall will be the various drivers, chipset, lan, audio, graphics, etc.. This will result in a cleaner - and somewhat faster PC.

 

2). The second-best method is outlined here in the Microsoft Support site, and will create a second copy of Windows, renaming the original as Windows.old.. It will work, but you may well have a number of issues and which may well be very difficult to repair without a lot of work and soul-searching. "Why in heck did I do this??" :(

With this method your app links will be kept intact.

 

Hope this helps... <_<

 

All the Best,

Wow, I forgot about that part, the hardware specific drivers and such. I guess I really can't just drop the old C hard drive into the new motherboard, but could I just try and add the new drivers to replace/overwrite the old hardware drivers? Hopefully I can just install the FSX drive as it was, using the Flight1 Registry tool to relink, and then install the few FSX apps I use that are installed on the C drive, like GEX, ActiveSkyEvolution, etc.

Well............. Here is an old trick I used with switching peoples machines from XP to Vista, which may work fine here as well, according to a little research. It may be possible in your situation to simply install your old disk (or much better, a backup of it) into the new computer and then boot from DVD and immediately upgrade to windows 8.

 

This gives you all your compatible programs on the new operating system, all set up and ready to run with possibly the least hassle possible.

 

If you attempt this perilous course, make sure to allow the "upgrade" access to the web to help clear up any driver and update issues.

 

Good luck!

 

http://www.techradar.com/us/reviews/pc-mac/software/operating-systems/windows-8-1093002/review/2