Yesterday, I was playing a game on my PC and it all went dead.
I've had it since May of 2012 but I didn't backup anything to external drives.
I always backed up to a partition drive on my system.

After trying multiple times thru the day I bit the bullet and went and bought an out of the box gaming system new. Spent $1,000 but that included a dvd writer, a 6TB external hard drive and a 256GB thumb drive. Gotta hit wally world today for a USB2.0 hub.

I have the original harddrive out of the old case but need a drive enclosure to see if I can recover anything or make a dual boot on this one.
Just gotta know if the hard drive failed or something else.

The New one:

what game?

Drive enclosures are easy to buy online from anyone who sells parts to build your own machine. Try Micro Center, Newegg, Tiger Direct or BHPhotoVideo.

Doom 3

It wasn't the game. I think the power supply failed (surges from the hurricane and subsequent efforts to restore power). Could be the motherboard or the graphics card, not sure.

I do know all the games I have played played without a problem till the system went 'poof'.

I found one at a local electronic repair shop for $10.
My old drive still works and I've been working on recovering it.
Gunna take awhile.

Is there not a spare bay in the new case for the hd?
Then you could leave it in there as a spare/backup -just switch cables if need be -or leave it hooked up to be continuously synced..

Also, there is probably free software to do exactly what you want as far as transferring old data to new drive.

If the same operating system, you can just format the new and clone the old one onto it (free software) -does not take long -only problem might be the OS serial (or whatever) number -but you should be able to just write it down and input it again.