My Motherboard has gone faulty, now I need a new one but need help with data transfer.

[DominicB96]

Hello,

As the title says, my motherboard recently died, has been going for a while with USBs failing and weird computer issues. But my main problem is now I have to either get a replacement or buy a new mobo.

Old Board: Gigabyte Z97P - D3
If I get the same one I shouldn't have any problem with the drives right? Being the same board the drives wouldn't get confused i was told, I want to check because it has all my university data on as it hasn't reached my back-up date. My last back-up was 6 months ago.

MSI Z97 Gaming 3
Really, I would prefer to go for a newer at a little bit more to hold my machine better. But will this completely fuck up my system with a new board just randomly being shoved in?

Is there a way to back-up my computer without turning it on, maybe using another PC?

Thank you.

 

[Karsten75]

The Operating system should be OK to boot on exactly the same motherboard.

If you get the other motherboard (or either way), I'd recommend you get a new hard drive, re-install the OS on that and then slave the old hard drive to copy the data off. That would be the safest and most cautious approach to something critical that you obviously don't value enough to back up more than every 6 months - which is about a full university semester, which means you have no backups of current coursework.