Clean install of windows

[Timsierramist]

Hello everyone.

 

I finished changing out my old MOBO/CPU for a new MOBO/CPU today, but no matter what I did, I could not boot into windows. I was essentially forced to install a clean version of windows 7, and all my files were placed in .old in the C drive.

 

So now i'm installing everything over again, which isn't too big a deal, because I know I can even move my saved games over to the new install, but the huge wealth of mods I accumulated are all sitting over in .old and I don't really know if there is a way to transfer them.

 

I'm faced with either installing all the mods one by one or seeing if I can get Nexus Mod on my new install to detect them and re-install them. Anyways it would be really convenient if that's the case. Hopefully I won't have to re-install any PC parts for a long time.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks in advanced!

[dragonslayer2k12]

When you change your motherboard the replacement will likely have a different chipset than the old mobo. Because of this, the drivers for that old chipset are trying to load and windows is like uh, no. So unless you get a replacement with the same or sometimes very similar chipset it won't work and you will have to reload windows.

 

The best thing to do is to use an SSD drive for your c:\ drive and another hard drive like 1TB or 2TB drive as storage. Even better would be to have two SSD drives, one as the main and another as a place to install games and apps, then the big drives for storage. This really comes in handy when you have to change a mobo and don't want to lose any info because any mods will be installed in that second SSD drive instead of the main drive. So you can wipe that main drive all you want and not lose anything, of course remember to stop using the my documents folder on the main drive too and use a mydocs folder on one of the big storage drives instead. That way anytime you reformat, you don't have to waste time copying files from storage to main drive. You have to think of the main drive as an unsafe and volatile area that should not contain any of your files but only files for windows and devices like sound card and video etc. Those devices get their files stored on the main drive but that is it, everything else goes on the other SSD drive.

 

I know there are a lot of bad experiences with SSD drives posted around here and other places but if you get the right brand of SSD you won't have to worry about anything and if you use SSD for main drive, the big storage drives will only be accessed when they are needed not all the time like the main drive is accessed. Windows vista/7/8 churns a lot, always doing something in the background with files. For normal hard drives that includes defragmenting the hard drive. But with an SSD drive there is no need to defragment because SSD doesn't work like that. For SSD there is something called TRIM or also called garbage collection and the SSD drives now have that built in so they don't have to depend on windows to do it or the mobo chipset software to do it. So SSD for windows will hopefully mean less churn and more performance. Think of an SSD drive as an expendable item, it won't last as long as a normal hard drive but they are faster at loading things and help preserve the life of a big hard drive by working as the main drive.

 

We are near the end of the year, the economy EVERYWHERE sucks bad, prices have never been better for SSD drive as a result and you could get a really good deal on a sammy 830 or crucial m4 128gb or 256gb and better drives are out too like corsair neutron with different controller than sandforce (bout time!) or get intel SSD they have a lot of different models for different prices. You want to stick with SATAIII don't go below that even if you don't have a SATAIII port on your new mobo you can always get one later with an addon card. You could also get a little risky and buy one of those ocz revo drive PCI-E cards which are basically the guts of two SSD drive on one board working as RAID drives by default for faster performance. They might have worked out the bugs on those now and they have them in 128gb and 256gb models now I think so they should be cheaper than they were a year ago. I am actually thinking about going this route and using my SATAIII ports for SSD app drives instead of main boot drive ports. I am under the impression that the revo drive is faster than other SSD not only because of RAID configuration but also because it is PCI-E based and should be even faster than two SATAIII SSD drive in raid?

 

Anyways sorry to ramble with a wall of text but it is better to consider these things and if you have the money it would be worth it.

[Timsierramist]

When you change your motherboard the replacement will likely have a different chipset than the old mobo. Because of this, the drivers for that old chipset are trying to load and windows is like uh, no. So unless you get a replacement with the same or sometimes very similar chipset it won't work and you will have to reload windows.

 

The best thing to do is to use an SSD drive for your c:\ drive and another hard drive like 1TB or 2TB drive as storage. Even better would be to have two SSD drives, one as the main and another as a place to install games and apps, then the big drives for storage. This really comes in handy when you have to change a mobo and don't want to lose any info because any mods will be installed in that second SSD drive instead of the main drive. So you can wipe that main drive all you want and not lose anything, of course remember to stop using the my documents folder on the main drive too and use a mydocs folder on one of the big storage drives instead. That way anytime you reformat, you don't have to waste time copying files from storage to main drive. You have to think of the main drive as an unsafe and volatile area that should not contain any of your files but only files for windows and devices like sound card and video etc. Those devices get their files stored on the main drive but that is it, everything else goes on the other SSD drive.

 

I know there are a lot of bad experiences with SSD drives posted around here and other places but if you get the right brand of SSD you won't have to worry about anything and if you use SSD for main drive, the big storage drives will only be accessed when they are needed not all the time like the main drive is accessed. Windows vista/7/8 churns a lot, always doing something in the background with files. For normal hard drives that includes defragmenting the hard drive. But with an SSD drive there is no need to defragment because SSD doesn't work like that. For SSD there is something called TRIM or also called garbage collection and the SSD drives now have that built in so they don't have to depend on windows to do it or the mobo chipset software to do it. So SSD for windows will hopefully mean less churn and more performance. Think of an SSD drive as an expendable item, it won't last as long as a normal hard drive but they are faster at loading things and help preserve the life of a big hard drive by working as the main drive.

 

We are near the end of the year, the economy EVERYWHERE sucks bad, prices have never been better for SSD drive as a result and you could get a really good deal on a sammy 830 or crucial m4 128gb or 256gb and better drives are out too like corsair neutron with different controller than sandforce (bout time!) or get intel SSD they have a lot of different models for different prices. You want to stick with SATAIII don't go below that even if you don't have a SATAIII port on your new mobo you can always get one later with an addon card. You could also get a little risky and buy one of those ocz revo drive PCI-E cards which are basically the guts of two SSD drive on one board working as RAID drives by default for faster performance. They might have worked out the bugs on those now and they have them in 128gb and 256gb models now I think so they should be cheaper than they were a year ago. I am actually thinking about going this route and using my SATAIII ports for SSD app drives instead of main boot drive ports. I am under the impression that the revo drive is faster than other SSD not only because of RAID configuration but also because it is PCI-E based and should be even faster than two SATAIII SSD drive in raid?

 

Anyways sorry to ramble with a wall of text but it is better to consider these things and if you have the money it would be worth it.

 

Thanks for the info. That seems like a good plan and I'll store that in my memory bank the next time I decide to go and build a PC out of nowhere, lol.

 

In any case, is there any way I can transfer the previously downloaded files to my new desktop, having NMM recognize them, and re-install them into the game?

[Timsierramist]

Woah, hang on! Looks like I wasn't giving Microsoft enough credit.

 

I was searching for the C:/games folder and found out it was missing from my .old file. I assumed windows did not save it.

 

Then I went to my new C:/games folder and found all my mods stored right where they used to be. Opening NMM, I found they were all there, and even installed? Now I need to open up Skyrim and test.

 

Looks like I may be good, and worst case scenario, I have to download them again, But at least I have my complete list.