Preparing to Upgrade lots of hardware - Need to Reinstall? Other questions

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stat30fbliss

stat30fbliss

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Jan 29, 2013
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Here is my use-case:

I purchased a copy of Windows 8 Pro OEM on Amazon back in Feb when building my current PC. With the slew of new Hardware coming out, I am going to be upgrading to a Haswell compatible Mobo with a i5 4670k, a 770 GPU and a new case :bounce:

Question #1:
I currently have Windows 8 installed on my 120GB SSD. With all of this new hardware will I need to reinstall Windows? Once I get that SSD plugged ino a SATA and boot up will it still be a recognized valid install?

Question #2:
I also have a 1TB RAID partition that I use to install all of my games and apps to consisting of 2 500GB WD Black HDDs. I used the built in windows RAID utility to partition these HDD's, not a BIOS utility.

I am assuming that when I upgrade my motherboard, and plug these two drives back into the SATA plugs, windows will not recognize the existing partition due to that change in motherboard ports that these HDDs will be plugged into.

Given that I assume these drives wont be recognized anymore, what would be the simplest and most pain-free way to go through this upgrade? Should I make a full OS image? Make a backup of the installed apps to an external HDD? Will I have to redo the RAID utility to get these set up as a 1TB Partition again and reinstall everything?

Thanks in advance!
 
Solution
goonbar79
Q1: Yes, you will need to reinstall windows for new hardware. The OS will only transfer to new hardware if the primary components (cpu, chipset, etc) are identical. You may also run into activation issue when swapping mobo. When in doubt, reinstall! It makes things so much more simpler.

Q2: Whatever utility you are using to raid0 2 WD HDDs, it is still never a bad idea to back it up before rebuilding it again. I recommend that you back it up to another storage as a full image (as you can compress it a bit to save some space). Just gotta make sure to use back up tool that supports raid array. Then, you should be able to rebuild raid with whatever utility you are using without much work involved, but if you ever run into a...
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goonbar79

goonbar79

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Q1: Yes, you will need to reinstall windows for new hardware. The OS will only transfer to new hardware if the primary components (cpu, chipset, etc) are identical. You may also run into activation issue when swapping mobo. When in doubt, reinstall! It makes things so much more simpler.

Q2: Whatever utility you are using to raid0 2 WD HDDs, it is still never a bad idea to back it up before rebuilding it again. I recommend that you back it up to another storage as a full image (as you can compress it a bit to save some space). Just gotta make sure to use back up tool that supports raid array. Then, you should be able to rebuild raid with whatever utility you are using without much work involved, but if you ever run into a problem, you can rebuild it using the saved image. I recommend you use this as an opportunity to hardware raid it. Whatever Haswell mobo you get (any decent one) should have raid feature built in, so use it.
 
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Solution
stat30fbliss

stat30fbliss

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Thanks for the response!

What type of auth errors might I run into, and what would be the best way to go about getting them resolved?
 
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goonbar79

goonbar79

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I have seen all kinds of issues. You may think it would transfer fine, until some weird issue crops up a week later. Technically, as long as the primary components are the same, you shouldn't have major issues, but I have seen it happen, so reinstall is always highly recommended. As for activation, I have seen various issues with windows 8, which is probably tied to the method MS uses (changed from win7 and before) that uses BIOS SN of sorts to match the license. Again, best thing to do is start from scratch, activate online while installation is done.
 
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