Old hard drive, new system

[GregM]

Howdy, as the sig says I'm pretty useless with this kind of thing, but luckily I'm a fast learner. Also I appologise if this question is answered somewhere else, if it is just give me a link and feel free to set me on fire if you ever meet me. Now this is kinda long so bear with me please :)

The motherboard on my old PC broke, so I figured it's upgrade time. I'm about to leave for the Reading branch of Novatech to pick up an "AMD Triple Core Athlon II X3 425" motherboard bundle, a "Novatech Achilles Tower Case with the 500w PSU and card reader" and an "Asus ATI Radeon HD 4830 512MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI/ PCI-Express - Retail" I will be salvaging the DVD rewriter and any cables I need from the old machine.

The only problem I have is the Hard Drive. I don't have it with me now (it's at my uncles, where I am headed to after getting the new bits) but I know it is a SATA with about 150GB. My problem is installation into the new system. I'm really not worried about keeping anything from the old drive, in fact I'd rather wipe it and start afresh, I'm led to beleive that a total wipe will eliminate any viruses I had on it unless they are embedded, not that it had any viruses that I know of or that my software picked up but better safe than sorry heh. So how easy is it to plug the old hard drive into the new system? Is it worth buying a new Hard Drive? I've really stretched my budget about as far as it can go and a hard drive is a minimum of £30 on top which I just can't afford (what with the petrol needed to do a lap of the M25! :D ) so I'd rather avoid it.

Anyway I'm sorry my first post on Novatech had to be so damned long! :D Would really appreciate any help, and I appologise in advance for my typing, on another forum I frequent I have won best typer of the year for 2 years in a running now :D (hoping for a hat trick next month)

[system7]

Totally straightforward to plug the old SATA drive in. It will work.

The OS will not boot in XP Home due to the changed configuration and a fresh or repair install is indicated.

I usually have the Hard Drive makers utility CD to hand to partition a drive into two halves in advance, since having seperate file backup is priceless in the long run.

Let us know how it all goes, Greg. We get precious few reviews of interesting Nova products at the forum. There is nothing like actually doing it. :thumbs:

[GregM]

Well I'll be damned. 7 hours of driving (3 o fthem in stop start traffic...) and a mere 2 hours putting the thing together, oddly the new system booted up first time, and i still have everything the hard drive had on it in the old set up. Had to adjust the BIOS for the USB drives but everythign else configured itself, which is kinda bizzare I think?
Either way, its up and running, I doubt its perfect but it works for now and thats the main thing, I've decided next purchase will be a hard drive and a copy of Win7 64 bit to make use of the 4 gig of RAM, once I have these I will start to worry about getting it all set up at its optimum performance. But I cant knock it, as it seems to be workign faster than my uncles quad core set up :D

[Mr Grapes]

probably would've been quicker to go to the portsmouth store... (less M25 to deal with although technically further from london... )
either way, that's a long way to drive to pick some parts up ;)

[GregM]

Was headed to crawley anyway so i just had to go the other way round the M25, well, in theory. traffic soon changed that