new mobo, cpu and psu = reinstall windows?

hey all, just looking for some opinions

my new mobo (msi k8n neo2 platinum), cpu (amd 3500+), and psu (sparkle 530) arrive tomorrow afternoon -- woo hoo

I'd love for this to be as easy as swapping the hardware, but nothing's ever easy..

I'll reinstall windows if necessary, but formatting my hard drive is the closest thing to impossible, I've got around 40 or 50 gigs of data that can't be backed up.

will a reinstall over my existing installation suffice? can I get away with skipping that altogether?

thanks in advance

You can try a repair but that most likely wont work with the extent of hardware that you replaced. Or you can just do a reinstall and it should save your existing data. Man, having 40 or 50 gig of data is a tuff one to back up, maybe getting a new hard drive and using your old one as a slave is a better solution. Install a fresh OS to the new hard drive and migrate the old data at will is what I spent most of the night doing here. I just upgraded to a SATA drive and have been moving game files and ran the files and settings transfer wizard to get my settings back.

Mike521 said:

hey all, just looking for some opinions

my new mobo (msi k8n neo2 platinum), cpu (amd 3500+), and psu (sparkle 530) arrive tomorrow afternoon -- woo hoo

I'd love for this to be as easy as swapping the hardware, but nothing's ever easy..

I'll reinstall windows if necessary, but formatting my hard drive is the closest thing to impossible, I've got around 40 or 50 gigs of data that can't be backed up.

will a reinstall over my existing installation suffice? can I get away with skipping that altogether?

thanks in advance

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Get a friend that you can LAN with, and move all your stuff to his PC, then format. Or invest in a cheap backup drive and format it. I never replace hardware without a format, just the way i've always done it. Good luck.