Reinstall 7 and Keep Documents?

I'm building a new computer and using some components from my old PC, including the hard disk that has my Windows 7 Professional install on it. I know that it's probably a good idea to do a clean install of 7 with all the new components (including the motherboard), but my question is this: Since I don't have any backup media large enough to hold all my files, is it safe to use a new partition of my old hdd to hold my documents and reinstall 7 to the original partition?

Generally, yes.

The only caveat is that if the entire drive fails, you are out of luck. You might want to copy the REALLY valuable stuff to a DVD or two as insurance--probably your text files--Word, Excel, etc.

drdrift said:

I'm building a new computer and using some components from my old PC, including the hard disk that has my Windows 7 Professional install on it. I know that it's probably a good idea to do a clean install of 7 with all the new components (including the motherboard), but my question is this: Since I don't have any backup media large enough to hold all my files, is it safe to use a new partition of my old hdd to hold my documents and reinstall 7 to the original partition?

yes , in fact I have been doing this for years and simply point to my "data" partition by changing location settings from properties in my user shortcuts, for any new OS install :)

Thanks for the quick replies. I am backing up essential files onto dvds, but there are lots of extraneous files that I would like to keep but wouldn't kill me to lose.

Just wanted to check in and say that I did a partition install and it worked flawlessly. Not only was my documents partition untouched and fully populated with my data, but it was also stored in the Windows.old folder on the new install. Can't say that it'll work like that every time, but it worked for me this time. I guess surprise redundancy is better than no redundancy?

Your old Win7 might well have run on the new hardware. I move HD's around all the time and Win7 almost always starts up, changes out all of its drivers, and then runs perfectly.