New PC/HDD advice please

My dads pc has been playing up for a while so he has bought a barebones system with the intention of just swapping the hdd. The problem with the old system is not related to the hard drive, thats working fine. However I plugged it all in and booted it up I got an error message. I then spoke to the guys at Novatech who built it and they told me I would need to do a fresh install of windows for it to work. Problem is there is a ton of stuff, documents emails etc that the old man needs kept. Is there a way round this? Could I partition the drive, install a fresh copy of windows then copy everything across?

My dads pc has been playing up for a while so he has bought a barebones system with the intention of just swapping the hdd. The problem with the old system is not related to the hard drive, thats working fine. However I plugged it all in and booted it up I got an error message. I then spoke to the guys at Novatech who built it and they told me I would need to do a fresh install of windows for it to work. Problem is there is a ton of stuff, documents emails etc that the old man needs kept. Is there a way round this? Could I partition the drive, install a fresh copy of windows then copy everything across?

The best thing to do is to temporarily turn the HDD into a Slave and attach it to another PC for that time. Then the files can be safely saved to CD or DVD. Don't forget any e-mail archive and favourites too. If you don't know what to do, then get someone who does know, because it is a piece of cake for the professional.

If you have a second PC, and the host HDD is big enough, you could temporarily transfer all the files and other important stuff to it, and then put the original HDD in the barebones PC, Partition it, install the OS, remove it, Slave it again in the second PC, transfer the files back, and then put it back in the barebones machine. Then sort out the slight mess you'll have. But at least you'll have kept all the important stuff, and it'll just be a case of removing the chaff and sorting.

Btw, it's not odd that you got the boot up error. You'd have been lucky not to, hence a thread I started, about a HDD with Windows ME on it, the other day.