hey, i am going to be adding a new motherboard, processor, and some ram and would be best to reformat when i do... but i have 11.2GB of music i am desperate to keep... when reformatting how would i keep this information?

If you have a CD Writer and a bunch of CDs, you can burn it as data to them, but better yet a DVD-R Writer for that size. If God has to teach someone a lesson more than once to get them to learn it, it just goes to show how stubborn they are.

You could temporarily add a second HD with a size that would accomodate the music and then copy it to that drive.

You don't absolutely HAVE to format. The column on the left is there for a reason but most people seem to ignore it. The following is from "Install Guides" under the section titled "Change Motherboard and save operating system" http://motherboard.windowsreinstall.com/ ASUS A7N8X-X Athlon XP 1800+ 8.5 x 200MHz 1024MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7 Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB WinME/WinXP Pro SP1

You would be ahead to reformat - less troubles later, believe me. I think the spare hard drive is the best idea. Once you reformat, just copy them back over. Simple. You can avoid many of these Windows problems with Linux. Linspire eases the transition for new users