New pc build w/ old HD (w/o reformat) question

New poster here, thought I'd throw out this question to you guys I'm about to build a new complete gaming pc, i've built many before but this will be the first time i've ever reused my existing hard drive and not reinstalled windows (I've got roughly 200GB+ of installed games/programs I really dont want to reinstall....). When I built my current rig the only drivers I ever installed were for my nvidia graphics card, no cpu/chipset/sound drivers. I was wondering that if I were to build the new rig and just swap over my current HD would there be any kind of boot/hardware compatibility issues to be worried about ?

Hard Drive in question is a sata WD Caviar Black partitioned into a C: drive with the OS (Win7 64bit) and a D: drive for all of my games/programs

Current rig:
Intel E8400 C2D
Gigabyte EP35-DS3L mobo
4gb Corsair Dominator DDR2 (cant remember speed)
evga GTX 460 gfx card (latest nVidia drivers)
600w Corsair Gamer series psu
sata LG Blu-Ray drive

New rig:
Intel i5 2500K
Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z68 mobo
8gb Corsair Dominator GT DDR3 1866
Asus Matrix GTX 580 gfx card
750w Antec HCG-750 psu
sata Blu-Ray drive swapped from old rig

 

I've done a couple system upgrades of my own Win 7 systems using hard drives from the old setups with mixed results. It helps if the old and new motherboards use chipsets from the same manufacturer.

For example I upgraded my system board a few months ago from a AMD 790 chipset board to a AMD 870 chipset board and 2 reboots later it was fine. It used Windows Update to get drivers it needed and runs fine.
When I went to put that 790 chipset board into my wife's system to replace an nVidia based chipset board using her existing hard drive Win 7 wouldn't load. Ended up just reinstalling Win 7 on her's as even the Repair option wouldn't work.

But on a friend's system, running the Repair option after a board change did work.

So I would say it's a definite maybe. I would back up your drive then try it.

Also you may have to call MS to get your Win 7 genuine again depending on which version you have.

Sam

 

Well the chipsets are both Intel.. old board being the Intel P35 and the new board being the Intel Z68 and as far as I can remember I never installed any sort of chipset drivers. Guess i'll just have to try it and find out... I'd really hate to redownload a ton of digital download games and patches lol

 

[solved]

After alot of digging and interwebz surfing I have found the answer. I'll post a link to the tutorial here for anyone attempting the same thing I am (Moving an existing HD with Win7 installed to completely new harware without reformatting).

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...lation-transfer-new-computer.html#post1161038 (Method 1) Though it DOES say this may not work with OEM versions of Windows7.

Psst... mods... might this link make a good sticky for other Win7 users migrating an old HD to new hardware ? :-D