transferring harddrive to new PC

[policeboy0]

I currently have 300GBs of programs/files that are pretty important to me (would rather not lose them) on my hard drive but theres a PC in my house that is much better than mine (more RAM, better MOBO, etc.) and I would like to simply move my hard drive and attach it to that motherboard. Unfortunately my current mobo and the better one are made by completely different companies and one is DDR2 and the other is DDR3 so theres absolutely no chance the drivers might some how match up. How can I do what I'm trying to do here? Partitions or something?

 

[spooky2th]

Your best bet is to save all the stuff that you do not want to lose and reinstall windows after the switch. Then the MB drivers and etc.

You can try a sysprep. If sysprep does not work you will have to install windows, programs, drivers and etc again.

To do this, go to C:\Windows\System32\Sysprep\sysprep.exe, check 'generalize', select 'OOBE' on drop down menu, and 'Shut down'.

When your new PC boots off of your old HDD, you'll get the 'out of box experience' screen, asking you to create new user account. Just call it anything and after that's done, you can log off and switch to your main user account.

Once you're logged in with your main account, you can safely proceed with deleting the newly made account in Control Panel > User Accounts applet

To clarify what sysprep does, it basicly gets rid of all platform specific data such as drivers and configuration files.