Windows 7 question

Got my new mobo/processor today after breaking my old one trying to replace the cooler. Windows gets to the boot screen but restarts after a bit. I did a little reading around and apparently it has to do with conflicting motherboard drivers, so I have to do a reinstall of Win7.

Is doing this going to format my hard drive/delete my files? There's a little bit of conflicting info so I'd like to get it clarified.

 

I think windows lets you try to fix the install or whatever, but I've only ever formated new partitions when installing windows. Also how the fuck did you break stuff with the cooler.

You can also boot a small linux distro and copy all your files off the disk before you format.

 

Are the conflicting drivers from the old mobo? If so then try to find a way to remove them by booting up in dos or using the boot disc/usb like Hamster said. And if you reinstall you will have to delete everything off your HD so in the event that you do make sure you get one of those boot disc that comes with like partition imaging software and other backup stuff and idk move the files over to an external or old HD you have lying around.

 

Just back shit up and wipe it clean. "Upgrade" installs or "Repair" installs are never clean, and it's just not worth the effort.

 

it is not a new computer though...

using a linux live cd and copying all the files off was the original plan, but it takes kinda long to:
1. find buried stuff i want to keep
2. copying it over and finding space on a spare hard drive

 

Stop hoarding. Seriously, just prioritise and lose some stuff. You don't need 90% of it, you just think you do.

 

I mean, I've hoarded so much now that I just buy new hard drives rather than delete stuff, because it's going to take me so long to organise, sort and delete it all. I've accumulated in excess of 4TB of shit, from TV, films, games, music, personal files, etc. Don't get into that habit, just nip it in the bud as early as you can before it snows you under.

 

Buy a SSD while you are at it,
install a fresh windows 7 on it,
unmount old harddrive in new windows and mount it in VMware player.
Profit.

You end up with a fucking fast new windows 7 + your old windows can run inside that VM and you can retrieve all your shit (the stuff that is not just plain data outside of programs).
Before you ask, activation won't give you trouble with CD keys double usage.

 

From personal experience, you have five options:

The first, and by far the easiest and simplest if you want to keep everything, is to make another partition on the hard drive and install a new copy of the OS onto it and have the computer boot from that. Of course, you'll need to have enough space for a new partition, and if you don't then you'll have to use GParted or something similar to shrink the partition, and if your hard drive was already full up you can't do this.

The second is to buy a new hard drive for the OS, it could be as small as 32GB so you could get a decent SSD if you want to, then install the OS on to that one and keep your old hard drive in the computer so you can access all your old files and use it for general file storage. Obviously, this costs money, but you do get a bit of a system upgrade with it and keep everything.

The third, as was already stated, is to take a live CD and manually back-up all the files you want. You can either back it up to another hard drive or to another partition. Despite Trickster saying that you don't need 90% of what you have, that varies from person to person. I know for my self, that's outright wrong. The other issue is that even if you only need 5% of what's on that hard drive, as you stated, finding that 5% is a bitch, and sometimes you have don't even know if you need something. It's easy to say, "If you can't think of why you'd need it, then trash it," but I have two images of laptops that I still find reasons to load up in VirtualBox and pull a file or two off of, even though I trashed the laptops over a year ago and took off everything I thought I needed. So this takes the least amount of space, but the most amount of time and leaves some doubt.

Fourth option is to reformat/reinstall and just let it all go. Most people I know wouldn't even consider this one, but it's by far the fastest, and cheapest way to get it up and running.

Then there's a fifth option that I don't want to mention, but will for the sake of completeness. You can fix it by hand. It is hard, it is tedious, it is boring, it costs nothing and takes up no extra space. I would never recommend this unless there's something incredibly critical about the specific install, you can't afford another storage device and your hard drive is too full to shrink partitions. If you want to do this one, you're going to have to figure things out on your own, because it requires registry editing and working with driver files that vary from computer to computer.

There are other options, by no means is this a comprehensive list, but most of them are too complicated to explain in a simple forum post or are too situational for me to bother.

This has never worked for me. Virtualization works by mimicking your computer's system and would most likely just give him the problem, because Windows *really* hates it when you change base hardware such as a motherboard. When you install windows, it creates a few system specific files. Change some of the base hardware, those files don't work anymore, Windows throws a fit. It's much better in multiple ways to just stick the old drive into the computer instead of mounting it with virtualization software. The only time I ever did something like this was when I had a broken laptop with important data, a working laptop, a Windows XP CD and an external hard drive. I swapped the hard drives and used the good laptop to save an image of the broken laptop's hard drive to the external drive, swapped them back, installed Windows XP into a virtual machine and then made a second partition in the virtual machine to mount the hard drive's image so I could retrieve important files. That's one of those "too situational to bother" solutions I was talking about.

Oh and there should be a startup repair option when you boot, or an option to repair an existing install if you boot from the install CD. You could give that a shot, it's worked for me only a few times but it's never broken anything.

 

because 200gb over 4 years is equivalent to 4tb

anyways im in the process of moving my needed files to another hard drive. im gonna regret it when i remember that there was some file in my firefox downloads folder that i wanted to hang onto
(also will be so much fun when i go 200gb over my isp download limit because i had to redownload my steam library)

 

You should be able to copy the whole steamapps folder and back it up. It'll work just fine.

 

not enough free space on my spare though

 

anyways i installed windows 7 without trouble and copied most of my files over

since i've replaced my motherboard and cpu, my 8800gt now likes to idle at 80C. electronics are such dicks.

 

update your bios, check settings. maybe that thing gets wrong current, wrong PCIe clock or whatever. Haven't experienced that before.

 

I've actually the same prob, since win 7 my gfx likes to idle at 85°C and if i start games in that state I'll get a blue screen error. If I check catalyst it says my gfx fan speed is 27% of the max, luckily you can set that higher manually by oc'ing, still ...27% if it runs at 85°C seems to me like a bit ... weird

 

yeah my fan runs at 43% when my gfx is at 79°C. but if I manually set it higher with rivatuner, there isnt any change at all in temp