The original plan was to upgrade the current workstation with new MB, RAM and CPU, keeping the disks as they were. Mostly because 1) I’m lazy and 2) I was not looking forward to transferring all my working files/programs to new disks. Been there, done that. Not fun.

Best laid plans, and all that.

Turned out the case I ordered (and liked best) was designed more with solid state disks(SSD) in mind. My boot disk was already SSD but a little on the small side. So I bit the bullet and switched to M.2 and SATA SSD for the boot and data disks, respectively. Kept the data disk at one terrabyte since that was the same size as my old HDD drive and perfectly adequate for my needs. Had some minor bobbles with USB and PSU connectors, but got the new machine (and by this point it was an entirely new machine) up and running, and now time to transfer the files. Getting everything off the old drives was easy enough with a large USB backup disk. And then…

Let’s simply say that certain modern backup/clone/restore software didn’t work as advertised and let it go at that. You know what did? A backup/restore program included with Windows 2007 back so long ago they were still referring to it as Windows NT. By the time it was done everything was in place and working just like on the old PC, programs and data alike (and yes, all my working files and the WIP for The Laws of Power book 4 made the trip in good shape). All I had to do was resize the partition to account for the larger disk and everything was set.

I’m always somewhat surprised when things go right. I’ll probably reincarnate the old machine as a Linux or ReactOS PC just to play with. Waste not, want not.