Reformat when upgrading?

[Richimself]

Alright, in a few days i should be getting my parts, i'm only salvaging the case optical drives and HDD. So i was kind of worried, my friend said a while ago when he just upgraded his mobo and psu he ended up having his hdd whiped, and my other friend says you don't need to reformat when upgrading. So just wondering if anyone can tell me the truth (sorry for the newbish question, never done this before) Oh and if anyone has a link to a good computer building guide that would be great, as i'll be needing it

 

[Richimself]

Anyone?

 

[digima$ter]

U probably could swap the info onto another hard drive and then put it back when u change the motherboard and PSU.

 

[Richimself]

But what i wanna know is do you actually have to reformat when you upgrade hardware or can you keep all your info and just whipe the drivers?

 

[mike4realz]

u don't need to reformat if u r upgrading hardwares on ur computer. (exept for motherboards, u'll need to reformat)

 

[Shannon]

I've upgraded lots of things, including the motherboard, without having to reformat and reinstall the OS, but if you're concerned that you might have to, or want to, partition your drive now with a seperate partition for your OS, and move all the data you need to save onto the second partition. then you will feel free to reformat that OS partition and reinstall the OS if you need to.

 

[Richimself]

Ah thank you, i'd rather not have to reformat, but should do what you said anyway just in case? could something possibly go wrong that would cause me to have to reformat? Thanks again for the help

 

[Shannon]

I like to keep a partition for my OS anyway, and have had lots of incidents where I was able to reinstall windows without backing things up. I highly reccomend it. And if you're doing an upgrade, it can't hurt to be prepared.

 

[Richimself]

Alright i'll probably do that then, thank you again for all your help