TR Forums

When doing a large upgrade (mobo, ram, processor, gfx)...

How do you go about retaining the drive letters of your individual drives so that when you boot up again, everything still works as it did?

Does each drive automatically retain its assigned letter, so you just put them in any SATA port and it works?

Never done a new install and not reinstalled windows, but it's running fine and I've got far too much to reinstall!!

Assuming Windows lets you do it without requiring a new registration key, just plug in the drives into the SATA ports in the same order they were pre-upgrade. You can always manually reassign drive letters if necessary, too.

If you're upgrading that much at once, bite the bullet and plan enough time to do a proper reinstall. Windows can handle in-place upgrades of memory and most peripheral cards, but once the mainboard and CPU are changed out, all bets are off, and you may end up with a marginally-stable mess.