Good advice!
 
Thanks

rivers88
FWIW, I have found that when performing OS upgrades (as with new builds), it could help eliminate some potential headaches if you leave most of your peripherals disconnected during the upgrade.
 
So, during the upgrade, you would want to have the obvious things like keyboard, mouse and external drives connected, but leave ancillary equipment (basically, any other external USB or Firewire devices, including the audio interface) disconnected. Once the OS upgrade is complete, plug in and install the external devices one at a time.
 
This will help you isolate any potential upgrade issues to a single device at time, and while it definitely helps with the troubleshooting, it might actually decrease the chances of multiple external devices causing problems during the upgrade.
 
This is an upgrade procedure that has worked quite well for me over the years with various Windows upgrades,  and as a result I have had very few hardware-related issues while upgrading.

Yeah, I'm ordering a new audio interface, so I removed my old (PCI) interface and installed Win 10 with just keyboard, mouse and network cable plugged in.

rivers88
FWIW, I have found that when performing OS upgrades (as with new builds), it could help eliminate some potential headaches if you leave most of your peripherals disconnected during the upgrade.
 
So, during the upgrade, you would want to have the obvious things like keyboard, mouse and external drives connected, but leave ancillary equipment (basically, any other external USB or Firewire devices, including the audio interface) disconnected. Once the OS upgrade is complete, plug in and install the external devices one at a time.
 
This will help you isolate any potential upgrade issues to a single device at time, and while it definitely helps with the troubleshooting, it might actually decrease the chances of multiple external devices causing problems during the upgrade.
 
This is an upgrade procedure that has worked quite well for me over the years with various Windows upgrades,  and as a result I have had very few hardware-related issues while upgrading.

Good advice!!
 
When I upgraded my DAW to Win 10 (last year), I didn't think about this and actually left everything plugged in. Fortunately, I didn't have any issues whatsoever and ALL my hardware drivers were automatically updated via the Win 10 upgrade (although I had downloaded them onto a flash drive to update after the upgrade).
 
I suppose I was lucky that it all worked out, but if I had to do it all over again......I'd follow your advice.  

Bristol_Jonesey
 
The current OS is installed on a 1TB SSD along with most of my sample libraries. I really do not want to touch these if at all possible.
 

Move your sample libraries and any song files (both project files and audio data) off your main HD and copy them to another HD. That way, if you do any future upgrades, all you need to do is replace or reformat your C: drive, reinstall OS and apps and point them to your other drives with data on it. This also helps if your C: drive ever crashes or gets corrupted; your precious data would be unaffected.

Thanks elson.
 
My sample libraries are on the SSD because it's a lot quicker loading them up compare to a traditional HDD
 
My fully loaded orchestral template would take 9 minutes to load when the samples were on a HDD, now it's less than 2, so I certainly do not want to lose this facility.