Tom's Hardware > Forum > Storage > Hard Disks > Hardrive on new system
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r1k0   10-03-2009 at 05:10:26 PM

Hey guys,I will be building my first computer soon. I have a windows xp 32 bit home and I am going to upgrade to windows 7 64bit when it comes out. Since by the time I get a hands on windows 7 it will probably about a month away. I want to put it together as soon as possible to find out if there is any problems with my hardware before the 30 day warranty expires.

Will i be able to use my current hardrive without reformating it to my new system/pc? or do I have to start all over by reformating my hard drive and installing windows xp and drivers then move it to my new system.?

I will be moving from Asus P5B Motherboard to the new Asus P55 motherboards.

I dont want to reformat my harddrive and install everything just to do it all over again when windows 7 comes out.

thanks!

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sminlal   10-03-2009 at 08:15:41 PM

Although going from XP to Windows 7 using a Win7 upgrade disk is valid from a licensing point of view, you can't in fact "upgrade" the XP system - you have to do a clean install. A "clean install" can be done by completely formatting the disk, or it can be done onto an existing XP disk, but the existing system will be ignored by the install procedure, the existing "Windows" directory will be renamed to "Windows.Old", and you'll have to reinstall all your applications.

As to whether you need to have the old XP system installed in order for the upgrade disk to verify that you have a valid previous version - I've seen a number of conflicting answers on this and it's my opinion that nobody REALLY knows for sure. Until I start hearing some reports from people who've actually installed Win7 using an upgrade disk I wouldn't hazard a guess.

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r1k0   10-04-2009 at 01:33:03 AM

Sorry if my writing confused you but i was asking if my current harddrive (which has windows xp 32 bit) would work on my new system with different hardware without having to reformat everything.

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sminlal   10-04-2009 at 02:45:30 AM

You can give it a try - you might need to install different drivers, which can be tricky if the drivers in question are the disk drivers (system won't run if it can't read the disk).

See the sticky at the top of the storage forum regarding swapping out drivers when you change controllers (which is kind of what you're doing by moving the disk to a new system): http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] ng-windows

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