I'm upgrading any day now from my crappy HP setup to a whole new one.
New mobo, cpu, ram, etc., but i want to keep my files if I can. Do I need to reformat or will everything be fine if i just connect this hard drive as it is?
If your OS is OEM then yes. Â And you will also need a new OS key.
Well, I got the disc from HP but I don't think its OEM
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Yes , you will need to reformat.
Do I actually have to wipe everything or could i try using the "repair" feature? I heard some people get it to work just by doing that.
No, Do not repair, if you have 2 hard drives put everything you want to keep (Music, Movies ETC) on that one, and install windows on the other. If you don't have a second HDD then just install windows and find another way to store you're stuff, if you don't care about redownloading music, movies etc, then don't put them on the other HDD I would recommend starting fresh with to clean hard drives.
No, Do not repair, if you have 2 hard drives put everything you want to keep (Music, Movies ETC) on that one, and install windows on the other. If you don't have a second HDD then just install windows and find another way to store you're stuff, if you don't care about redownloading music, movies etc, then don't put them on the other HDD I would recommend starting fresh with to clean hard drives.
If you dont have anything to back up on, make a new partition and store all the shit there, then install the os on the old partition. then when done, put all the files from the new partition to the old, and merge the two partitions.
I've got an 8gb flash drive that i packed most of my important files on, so I'm just gonna start fresh.
always wanna back them files up bro, I myself half 3 copies of all my files strategically saved to multiple disks. 
Got a 500GB external drive for 60$ in sale...I back up all my music, movies, pr0n, important stuff on that. Consider getting one, they are quite cheap nowadays.
8GB! .....I F'd up my HDD...Now I can only put XP on it. No more vista :( Too scared to lose my 145GB of Media..ahaha
Generally, if you change motherboards you need to reformat.
I have pulled HDDs from working systems and put them in 100% different hardware and it takes a little bit of coaxing but it works.
If you install all the new Hardware drivers, then yank the drive and plug it into the new system. it should find everything. it just might take an hour.
Not what I would reccomend. But it has been done before. (pulled from a Dell Precision)
and as long as you are plugging the drive into a similar spot (i.e. SATA port 1 on both systems) you should have few problems.
Now this was done on an XP machine. Never tried it with Vista.
Well, when me and my dad rebuilt this computer we used the same same HDDs and it worked fine until my XP drive failed recently. I would personnally recommend storing all of your data an another HDD and installing W7 or your copy of Vista becuase computers will generrally run faster with a fresh start. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â - Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â - Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Also me and my dad had some dificulty making things boot correctly after the rebuild. But that was mostly due to the fact that we where using grub and two HDDs configured seperately on an IDE connection. (It was a nightmare) You probably wont have that problem though. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â (Eff you gameriot and your messed up spacing)
I know what you're talking about. Using two drives on an IDE cable is hell. I appreciate SATA a lot more now.
i had to format the other day and i jsut used my 120Gb IPOD classic and put it into disk mode and put everything on there and transfured it to my new comp? this could help no?