Hardware AND install combination question

[b_hayles]

Total newbie here...Be gentle!

I just installed Mint Cinnamon 18.3 five days ago and so far am happy, but...

I put the cart before the horse. Let me explain:

I have an older system (built Nov 2011) that has what WAS top shelf hardware, but its getting old. Motherboard is an ASUS Sabretooth 990FX. cpu is an AMD FX6100. I have 2x 8GB DDR3 RAM. I cheaped out on the video card(s) and put 2 NVIDIA GeForce 620'a in the box. I have two 1TB hard drives with almost 2000 days on them. I know its older but I'm planning to rebuild in the next 30-60 days with new cpu (AMD FX 8350 ) and 2x WD Black 2TB HDDs. New video card(s) will have to wait. RAM will probably stay the same.

I should have done the upgrade first, but I didn't, and now I'm wondering about getting my surrent OSs to the new system. I have a dual boot system with Win7 on C: and about half of D: and Mint on a 250GB partition of D:.

I have the capability to do a full bare metal backup of my entire Windows system, OS, Programs, and data via Cloudberry Labs Backup Pro. The problem is space. I don't have room to backup even my data, much less Win OS and programs.

After upgrading, how do I wind up with a dual boot system with one drive being everything I had on the whole computer before Mint and the other drive being nothing but Mint?

[VUMeter]

Seagate and WesternDigital 7200rpm 3.5" SATA HDDs are not that expensive.
You could grab one or two and backup everything for the short term on them, and then use for data storage.

As for backing up/restoring Windows. Eeek, it doesn't fair well. Some find it's OK other find it leads to corruption down the way.
For me, when I built a totally new AMD Ryzen system, I yanked out the old HDDs from my Core2Duo system and put them in an external USB enclosure. I could load in program settings, as they mostly reside in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\
I also set things up differently to most, and my Desktop, Browser cache and some other stuff is on another physical disk to the OS, so it's easy to copy anything I need from there to a new system/resurrect on a new OS install.

As for Linux, well, I'm a noob here too. I'm guessing that as long as things haven't been compiled for the specific hardware in your current system, Linux is intelligent enough to 'fill in the gaps' when transported to a new system/new hardware. Linux might well have the tools to do the clone of itself to a new HDD too.
I'll let others chime in here as I am out of my depth and will just give false information if I continue. Sorry.

[BG405]

Changing the hard drives might trigger a need to reactivate Windows; changing the CPU is quite likely to. Apart from that, Windows should boot up OK. It might not with different graphics card(s) unless you install the drivers first. I assume you'll be cloning the existing partitions to the new drives?

Linux usually works fine even with different hardware, except with certain graphics cards.

If you clone the Linux partitions to the new drive and are using UUIDs rather than partition labels, those UUIDs may be different, in which case an edit to fstab is in order. We can help with that.

[b_hayles]

I assume you'll be cloning the existing partitions to the new drives?

I hadn't planned to. I was planning to have one drive for Windows and Windows specific stuff and the onther drive be everything Linux and Linux related stuff. I wasn't planning to use any partitions unless I need more linux related space (I do a LOT of video work and don't delete ANY assets, even when finished with them), in which case I would turn half of the Windows drive into storage space for linux related items.