When your motherboard craps out on you how can you get your files off the old hard drive to your new one?

what I would do is go and buy another HDD and format and OS it. Then you can move all of the important files off of the others, or just leave them in as slave drives. thats how I have done it for years. Ive done this to my computer, my moms, friends, and I have never lost a single file. Its a little time consuming, but it works very well.