Please Help, Probably quick fix

[Blue Stealth]

Ok so I have just put windows 7 on, lets call it, drive A. I have steam and my 22gig steamapps folder on drive B, running vista ultimate 64-bit.

What I need to do is change the path for my games so that steam, on drive A, will detect my games on drive B.

Two reasons why I want to do this.
Reason 1: Id rather not waste space on drive A its only 150 gigs
Reason 2: Drive A is only 7200 rpm and drive B is 10000 rpm, running games off drive B would be faster.

Thanks
-Blue

 

[Bulletsponge]

Log in Vista. Perform a backup of your games using Steam. Log out. Log in to Windows 7, restore your games as appropriate. Test them. Log out. Log back in to Vista and remove them from steam by delete/uninstall.

This isnt fast, but probably the most safe and technically sound in terms of registry settings and dll registrations for both versions of Windows.

 

[BaHAmuT]

There's a couple approaches you could take:

1. Find the setting that tells steam where to it's steamapps folder is and change the setting to point to the steamapps folder on drive B. This assumes such a setting exists and is not defined in a binary. Also, it assumes Windows 7 can mount drive B and read/write to Vista's implementation of NTFS. I don't think that's a safe assumption, unless you can find some Microsoft documentation about it.

2. If Windows 7 supports symbolic links, you could make a symlink on drive B, B:/steam/steamapps point to A:/steam/steamapps. The approach also assumes Windows 7 can mount drive B and read/write to Vista's implementation of NTFS. I don't think that's a safe assumption, unless you can find some Microsoft documentation about it.

3. Copy the Steam or steamapps folder from drive B to drive A. Or just re-download the games from Steam onto drive A. I think this is the safest bet. Even if you have only 150GB on drive, the beta of Windows 7 only lasts until August (IIRC) . Won't you have to wipe your drive then anyway?