Installing existing SATA HDD on new mobo

[lostplanet]

for my existing primary SATA drive (now becoming secondary or storage) to be recognised by the new motherboard does this mean i have to reformat or reinstall windows to add the Via or asus sata driver/controller, losing all my data?

existing motherboard:
Abit NF7 S2G -nvidia chipset

new motherboard:
Asus A8V D rev 2 -Via chipset

existing drive:
maxtor 120GB Sata as storage drive with 40GB used space and OS to be removed.

New primary drive:
WD 37 GB raptor as OS drive.

[Gizmo]

You can format the existing drive to get rid of the OS and everything that's on it and then install your new drive on to your new motherboard as the boot drive and install your OS on that. Or you can take the alternative and ghost the existing OS and everything on it onto your new drive, then reformat the existing drive.

Originally Posted by lostplanet does this mean i have to reformat or reinstall windows to add the Via or asus sata driver/controller, losing all my data?

If your OS is XP, you'll need to do a repair reinstall of it so it can install the drivers needed for the new motherboard. But if you take the first option, which is to wipe the existing drive and start afresh with the new drive, you would've already installed the new drivers needed for the new motherboard.

[Aver]

I think that you needn't reinstall windows, because you can create an image of your existing primary drive after that install your motherboard and formatted HD. At last you just inject CD with the image of you HD (As it take not much space due to compression) and install on new HD. So you won't lose any data.
And if your OS suddenly crashed, you could recover it due to hard drive backup software.