The best option is to get a new hard drive. You can find one for $100.
Then just connect your old drive to the PC with a USB to SATA adapter and copy any files you need.
With the extra drive there is no risk to your data from the install as long as you DON’T CONNECT THE OLD DRIVE DURING THE INSTALL PROCESS, since you could conceivably choose the wrong install disk. If it’s not plugged in then you can’t choose it
You can get them substantially cheaper than that! but your point holds. A USB stick is also rather cheap - you can get a 128GB SANDisk jobbie for £10 a pop on Amazon.
I second this, second disk is best as you can keep your old Windows drive in case you ever need to go back for any reason. Modern UEFI makes dual booting way easier than it used to be as the UEFI itself provides a boot menu so you don’t need to fiddle with dual booting using a bootloader like GRUB.
The best option is to get a new hard drive. You can find one for $100.
Then just connect your old drive to the PC with a USB to SATA adapter and copy any files you need.
With the extra drive there is no risk to your data from the install as long as you DON’T CONNECT THE OLD DRIVE DURING THE INSTALL PROCESS, since you could conceivably choose the wrong install disk. If it’s not plugged in then you can’t choose it
You can get them substantially cheaper than that! but your point holds. A USB stick is also rather cheap - you can get a 128GB SANDisk jobbie for £10 a pop on Amazon.
I second this, second disk is best as you can keep your old Windows drive in case you ever need to go back for any reason. Modern UEFI makes dual booting way easier than it used to be as the UEFI itself provides a boot menu so you don’t need to fiddle with dual booting using a bootloader like GRUB.