New Harddrive + Steam

[m3rryg0r0und]

Today is my 17th birthday and as a gift I received a Tb internal hard disk drive. The question now is I would like to move all off my steam games from the old drive to the new one and have future games be installed onto that new drive. How would I be able to pull this off without having to reinstall all my games and without losing some of my single player game data.

 

[Jubei]

The new drive will probably be faster than the old drive. I would clone the old drive to the new one and boot from it.

 

[Jubei]

BTW, what are the specs of your two drives?

 

[RustyPwns!]

I believe if you move the entire steam folder to your new drive it'll start downloading and installing games there. A lot of games creates other folders too in your C so it's gonna be quite the hassle. Maybe reinstall steam in your new drive. I personally keep my games on C and have my music docs pics etc on my internal storage drive

 

[m3rryg0r0und]

old - http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...fa74c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD&locale=en-US

new - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148321

 

[Jubei]

If you got the kit, it comes with the cloning software and instructions on how to do it. My wife has one of those drives and, even though I have other software, tried the kit's software just to see how it works. It was painless. After the switch, your machine will behave just like it did with the old drive, except now it should be a bit faster and you'll have more space.

 

[m3rryg0r0und]

yea it did come with the software and I have it installed

 

[Jubei]

Did you use it to clone the old drive?

Once you do that, take out the old drive, move the new one to the old one's SATA port and try booting. It should work. If not - put it back together the old way and we can troubleshoot.

If you want to use the old drive in addition to the new one, do this:

Make sure the old drive is not installed. Make a desktop icon that says "new drive." Hook up the old drive. Reboot. If you see the new desktop icon you'll know for a fact that you booted off the new drive. The old one should be visible. Now you can do whatever you want with it.

 

[Naku_vamp]

I believe if you move the entire steam folder to your new drive it'll start downloading and installing games there. A lot of games creates other folders too in your C so it's gonna be quite the hassle. Maybe reinstall steam in your new drive. I personally keep my games on C and have my music docs pics etc on my internal storage drive

i tired that once...i could have just did it wrong but steam didn't recognize it it just rcreated a NEW steam folder and then starte dreintalling all my old games form 0% offline but i could have just didnt do someting right

 

[_Sushi]

Close steam, delete everything in your steam folder except Steam.exe and steamapps, drag to location on new drive, run Steam.exe, verify all your games.

 

[Ma$termind]

Another option is to trick Windows/Steam using symbolic links. This is the method I use to keep my games on my 1TB drive, but Steam itself on my SSD.

Simply make sure Steam is closed, then cut and paste the entire steamapps folder to the new HDD. After it has finished, hit the windows-key, search "cmd", right-click it, and select "Run as administrator".

In command prompt type in the following (make sure to use the correct paths for the the old and new locations):

mklink /j "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps" "D:\steamapps"

This will create a symbolic link, tying the two locations together - fooling Steam into thinking nothing has moved, while actually keeping your data on the new drive. This change will work even when installing new games, too. They will install correctly in the new location without any extra work.

 

[Jubei]

Here's a tutorial on symbolic links: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/howtos/howto_use_symbolic_links_master_vistas_file_system

It was written for vista, but I see no reason why it won't work with windows 7. It even has a section for steam games.

I still think moving everything to the larger, faster drive is better - as it would improve system speed a little.