Thanks everyone! And for everyone in the U.S., have a very happy 4th!

 Thanks Richard & everyone for your answers and help. Much appreciated!

 Speaking of using 2 Titan-Xs, which a few of you are, what kind of PSU do you need to run 2 of those which require 250w of power each? Is an 850w unit going to cover all that & be stable, or not?

The Titan-X has 12Gb of RAM by itself. My main RAM is 16Gb with a quadcore 3.7Ghz I7 proc and 3 HDDs. I may soon replace my C drive with an SSD.  

 By "very old .daz files," how would you define that? How old is too old? I have .daz format files going back to late 2011 or early 2012 through early July of '14. They were all created & saved with DS 4.03+. All were with V4.2, no previous generations. I do know that everything created & saved from at least last year and most of '13 had been working fine up until the Hdd failure.

My understanding was from what someone said maybe a year or two ago was that 4.5 is the last DS version that recognizes the old .daz extension and all files saved that way, and that I need to use that to convert all the old .DAZ files to .DUF. However as a link above posted by Razor42 says, there was a problem with all versions before 4.6.2.2(?)with compatibility. So apparently I now need to update to 4.6+ before I can have a program that reliably converts .daz to .duf with no problems.

And since 4.8 does not recognize the old .daz format, everything will need to be converted to a .duf file before I can install 4.8,  open those files & work with the content.  

Thanks for your answers. I don't know that I did. I'll have to look through my external drives. What I do know is that I have multiple folders with all my downloaded content from both DS website & Rendo, so at least I don't have to download everything all over again. But it will be tedious reinstalling ALL that. (sigh.)

And I want to wait until after I get Windows 10 final release version, cause there's no point in installing DS until I do that. The new Win10 install will just wipe everything off my HDD, so I need to install the new os first.

HOWEVER, after I do that, to go back to my original question, should I install DS 4.6.3.52 first, convert all .DAZ scene files to .DUF & then upgrade to 4.8? And will doing that(installing 4.8) wipe out all my 4.6+ data library folders?   

 To bhoins & RH,

To answer your questions, I was opening them in DS4.03, and they were originally saved in the same. Then the C drive DS was installed on crashed. I replaced it with a new drive(Win7/64) and reinstalled DS 4.03. When I went to open the Daz scene files with Vicky4 that were backed up on external drive in the reinstalled program, is when I got all the missing files messages. Like I said, there's around 27-30Mb of saved character, hair, clothes, etc in each .daz scene file, but the program doesn't recognize it and reports missing files.

Now granted, I reinstalled 4.03, but not all the things used to make my characters originally. So, do I need to reinstall all the V4.2 character, muscle morphs, hair & body files, all the skin & vascularity shaders & body fixes, props & clothes back into the DAZ Library folders?  I was under the belief that the data saved in each Daz scene file which included all the above shouldn't have to be recreated and remorphed from the ground up. But what say you? 

Thanks tparo. So in the conversion, if she(V4.2) has hair, certain skin textures & shaders, vascularity add-on, and a prop in hand, does all that remain?

I hope so, cause I don't want to have to go through a process with every single scene where I have to redo everything. Like Meipe & Xameva's and I13's many different body fixes for arms, hips, thighs, shoulders, genitals, etc.  And man, I've spent countless hours on posing. I don't mind removing clothing b4 the conversion, but I sure don't want to have to redo and reapply every fix & morph.

I believe it's only scene files that have issue. Everything else should still load as legacy items.

This may help.

https://helpdaz.zendesk.com/entries/22469349-How-to-fix-a-DAZ-Studio-Scene-File-duf-with-legacy-figures

Razor, thanks for that link. That will help. However, I never did get that far. My old .daz files are still that. They haven't been saved the first time as .duf files. That script is for Daz scenes that have already been converted to Duf  Pre-4.6+.

So how do I convert from .Daz the first time? Install 4.5, open old daz scene file, and then what? Does 4.5 give you an option under Save to Save As ...duf file?

One thing I ran into after replacing a dead HDD with a new one & installing even my trusty old DS 4.03 was when I went to open a .daz scene file it got to a point a few seconds in to opening where it said such & such files were missing or could not be found. The DAZ scene & character files were being opened from an external drive where I had backups of those files. That included V4.2, hair files, skin texture, clothes, props, and just about everything else. But when I tried to open that scene(any given .daz scene file say "Relaxing,Bedroom,Night") I got that error message about "files missing or cannot be found. Would you like to locate..."

And I'm thinking "Come on, they're right there already! This is a 27.8 Mb file so there's character, hair, clothes & props data in this file and has been since the day I saved it months ago."  So I need to be able to open those .daz files, and then save to .duf somehow before I can use that legacy fixing script.  

Thanks Richard. I've seen lray spelled(apparently incorrectly)as iRay a few times, and with largecase I looking like smallcase l, well you can see my confusion. lol

But thanks again.  

To Goofygrape & Vaskania,

Pardon a potentially stupid question but are those links you're talking about for converting a V4 character to G2F or converting the V4 skin texture to G2F? I've always favored Vicky characters to G2F, but seems DS is really really pushing Genesis 2 anymore. I'm intrigued by the possibility of 3D Printing my V4 character, but DAZ only allows that for Gen2. 

 Okay, my bad, iRay, not LRay or lRay.

Thanks for the info everyone. As always though, if I go away for a while I always find myself with a big learning curve to deal with upon returning. Never really did get the hang of lighting in previous DAZ versions. It always seemed so counterintuitive to the real world, which is why I always struggled with it and the technical stuff involved that went waaaaay over my head. Which is why some good "See-Spot-Run" or "DS lighting for Dummies" tutorials would've been real helpful. I was going to try the Dreamlight tutorials, but a lot of people on these forums had bad experiences with the author and felt ripped off, so that scared me away from trying them; didn't want the same experiences. So I'll see what I can find on YouTube & see if I can make sense of "iRay."

As for DS 4.8, can we still save our renders in .BMP, or .TIF?  

Yeah ... reloaded in a different directory in DIM and all is good. 

 

Which directory?

Like Kevin, I would hope that feature will be available in a future DAZ version.

OK, thanks!