Symbolic Link for steam

[Fullmetal]

Good day edge gamers,

I am one of the lucky few who get to game on a laptop. The laptop that I use is also my school laptop, so I take it with me to school everyday. I recently bought a 1.5 TB external hard drive and a friend taught me how to do symbolic linking, so I installed steam on my laptop hard drive and used a symbolic link to put my steamapps folder on my external hard drive. When I try to boot up steam without the TB hard drive plugged into my laptop, it gives me the "Internet problem or steam network problem" message.
Does anyone know of a way to get steam to work with steamapps symbolic linked on a different hard drive?

 

[crackdaddy]

Hey, do you mean shortcut? Symbolic links are usually referenced to unix/linux based systems.

what is your exact error message?

 

[Fullmetal]

It's not a shortcut, I have the games physically installed on the hard drive and the hard drive is not always connected to the laptop. I'm running Windows 7 currently. I get 2 error messages.
"Could not connect to Steam network. This could be due to a problem with your internet connection, or with the Steam network. Please visit www.steampowered.com for more info."
and
"You do not have enough disk space available to run this game. Please free up some disk space and then try again."
I can boot up steam, but when I try to log in I get these messages.

 

[Ph?bus]

Use a symbolic link on the whole folder, perhaps?

What OS are you using, by chance?

 

[crackdaddy]

Probably a dumb question,
Do you have the hard drive connected when you get the errors?
does it work fine when connected?

 

[crackdaddy]

One more thing, is Steam installed on your C: drive or your external drive?
By default steam installs apps in the drive it was installed to.
Chances are, you've got 2 problems going on here.
one is your internet connection and the other, its trying to install games on your c: drive or some other drive that is almost full.

Personally, I'd remove all my steam apps and steam itsself, and do a full install again to your external drive, this includes steam itself.
Its rather drastic, especially if you have like 40 gigs of games, but it's probably the easiest fix.
It could be a matter of a corrupted cache file or something else. Have you tried verifying your local content?

 

[Fullmetal]

Pho, I'm using Windows 7.
crack, I do not have the hard drive connected when I get the errors, and yes, it does work fine when it is connected. Steam is installed on my C: drive. My C drive can't be full as it has about 120 GB of memory left.
I did a fresh install of steam the other day and created the symbolic link. My goal was to have steam installed on my laptop so I can use the chat feature and have my games installed on the hard drive so I can still talk to people while I'm at school.
I don't have any steam games currently on my laptop hard drive and it's a fresh install, so I don't it would be corrupt.

 

[Ph?bus]

I don't know if you can do that, man. You can get something like Raptr for talking to your friends (which has Steam chat), and just install Steam normally on the external drive.

 

[crackdaddy]

Hey check this out

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7418-YUBN-8129

During the installation of Steam, you have the option to install Steam to a location other than the default. Since Steam relies on the game files residing in the SteamApps folder, your game files cannot be moved outside of this folder. The game files must be in the SteamApps folder in order to function.

 

[Fullmetal]

balls