I am upgrading most of the major components in my computer soon (motherboard, cpu, memory, graphics card), and while I'm at it I want to do a new install of Windows 7 on a new hard drive. The old hard drive seems to be okay, but it's only a matter of time before it fails anyway.
After I've installed Windows, if I plug the old drive into my motherboard, my understanding is that I should have no problem getting into most of the files stored on it (in C:\Whatever). I'm not planning to boot from it or use its installation of Windows to run the new computer. If I try to access the stuff in the Users folder (desktop, documents, etc.), though, will that all be somehow restricted, or are those just regular folders and files if I'm not using the instance of Windows where they were originally saved and protected?
I tried searching for this, but most of what I found related to the process of physically getting an old hard drive hooked up in a new PC. If anyone can let me know if this will work, I'd appreciate it. It could save me a lot of time creating an extra backup that I may not need, heh.
After I've installed Windows, if I plug the old drive into my motherboard, my understanding is that I should have no problem getting into most of the files stored on it (in C:\Whatever). I'm not planning to boot from it or use its installation of Windows to run the new computer. If I try to access the stuff in the Users folder (desktop, documents, etc.), though, will that all be somehow restricted, or are those just regular folders and files if I'm not using the instance of Windows where they were originally saved and protected?
I tried searching for this, but most of what I found related to the process of physically getting an old hard drive hooked up in a new PC. If anyone can let me know if this will work, I'd appreciate it. It could save me a lot of time creating an extra backup that I may not need, heh.