I am soon looking into doing a full re-install of Windows and all of my software on my main machine. My main reason is to do a spring cleaning on it, regain some speed. I haven’t re-install Windows in several years, and my PC is getting a bit clogged with crap, if you know what I mean. This is my main production machine, so I cannot lose good work time. Traditionally, re-installing Windows means hours of downtime to re-install the OS, get it set up the way you want it, re-installing all of your software and transferring your data files back over to it. It can take quite awhile, and I just don’t have time.

An answer is to simply buy yourself another hard drive and re-install to that. That’s my plan. I have bought another hard drive. They are dirt cheap these days. Then, I will temporarily unhook my current hard drives and hook up the new one, set up the new disk and re-install Windows. Now, seeing as I have to be able to work, I can simply re-hook up my old drives and boot like normal. So, basically, I can re-attach the new drive whenever I wish to work on the re-installation project, but when it is time for work, I’ll hook up the old drives and go to it like nothing happened.

This is simple to do. Just open up your case and mount the new hard drive in a spare drive slot. When you want to boot the PC using that drive, just remove the ribbon cable from the old drive(s) and plug into the new one. When you want to go back to work, swap the cable back over. And the beauty of this, too, is that you still have your full system intact on the old drives in case you need to get any other data files from it to move them to your freshly installed operating system.

Yes, this idea does mean you have to fork the money for another hard drive, but it does allow you to use your system to work while working on the re-installation in your spare time on another hard drive.