[SOLVED] Can I use my old hard drives / SSDs in my new pc?

[Jack Ross]

I am currently upgrading my cpu, motherboard, power supply, cooler and ram and I was wondering if I can simply plug in my old hard drives and SSDs into my new motherboard and it would have all of my games and apps still there. Ultimately I don’t want to have to reinstall all of my games and apps so if anyone has any suggestions as to how I could do this that would be greatly appreciated
Cheers

 

[Lafong]

If you are replacing CPU and motherboard, that would call for a clean Windows install onto your chosen boot drive. You can say no to that and just plug in and see what happens......at some risk. Maybe it works, maybe not; maybe it works well enough in April, but not well in October. A risk you can choose to take. Maybe you spend 100 hours trying to straighten it out....and ultimately fail. Or not.

If your other non-booting drives are purely data, they can just be plugged in.

If all of your installations were on C, you'd typically re-install all of them after doing the clean install of Windows.

I know NOTHING about gaming installations.

 

[SkyNetRising]

I don’t want to have to reinstall all of my games and apps

Prepare for full windows reinstall. Apps will require reinstall.
Game libraries may be migrated without reinstall (if they are on a separate storage location from windows OS drive).
For steam games and battlenet games this is possible for sure. With some other games you may have problems.

If you try to avoid reinstall, you'll have several issues:

boot mode compatibility - system doesn't boot,​

drivers incompatibilities - bsods/crashes/bad system performance,​

windows activation issues.​

 

[Jack Ross]

Thank you!
So if I back up my steam games to an external hard drive I will be able to transfer them onto the new pc? And also would you suggest wiping the drives before putting them in the new pc and using a usb with windows installer for the initial boot?

 

[USAFRet]

Thank you!
So if I back up my steam games to an external hard drive I will be able to transfer them onto the new pc? And also would you suggest wiping the drives before putting them in the new pc and using a usb with windows installer for the initial boot?

To start, only ONE drive connected, whatever one you want the new OS on.

Install on that, deleting all existing partitions in the process.

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial

If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows...

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Connect any other drives later, and wipe as needed.