Launching Game from Secondary

[TheGreatSatan]

My R2-M5 is near death. The Raptor drive inside is just about dead, but no big deal. I installed all my games, mod managers and mods all on my secondary 1TB drive. Can I rebuild, drop the drive in as a new secondary and run the games from there?

I'll back up up my saves too.

[RogueOpportunist]

Kind of depends on the game, I know that I've wiped/restored my gaming machine quite a few times, each time restoring my game data from backups stored on another drive, I basically just had to reinstall the games from scratch first (to make all the registry entries and what-not), then stop the patching/updating, copy the backup directories over the new directories and then in "most" cases the games would run perfectly fine, in a few examples (like the latest WoW builds) you sometimes have to fiddle around with it to figure out how to get it to recognize the old files instead of trying to update over top of them but it's still "doable".

Either way, depending on location you may need to reinstall the game for it to remake the registry entries, be careful you don't tell the game to install to your already existing directory though, some games will delete what is there when they install themselves, if you wanted to install it to say D:\Games\Game make sure that the Game directory doesn't already exist, let it do its basic install then copy your old game directory over the existing one... That's the safest way to go about it, if you launch some games from the directory hoping they will just "run" they might detect the directory change as game corruption and it may delete your game directory in an effort to "restore" it so be careful.

[AmEv]

Clone the OS drive to another one.

I find Ubuntu the best for HDD cloning, personally.
Not sure how? Youtube it.

[RogueOpportunist]

I would be wary of cloning a failing drive, you might end up cloning corrupt data that you may not encounter for months but when you finally do encounter it you might start thinking your new hard drive is failing, meanwhile windows has just run into some corrupt data and in response started corrupting even more data.(it does that)

[TheGreatSatan]

Plus, I'm going to be using an SSD this time and don't want to clone a mechanical drive to one. I hear that they don't do so well like that. My games are Fallout 3, F3 New Vegas and Oblivion. I'm hoping since New Vegas is on Steam I'll just have to reload the mods I've installed for that. This time I'll be using at least a 120GB SSD and installing them there which then they'll load faster.

I really don't want to replay all the quests, but at least it'll be easier.

Think positive, think positive....

[diluzio91]

move all your user folders to your other drive, then your save data will automatically be there when you point them there in the new OS.
(to do this if you dont know how)
select folder, example, my docs from the win 7 user folder.
Right click, properties, location tab
click move
create a new folder in the desired location.

Then when you install the new OS repeat the same steps, just select the folder on your 2nd drive as your location

For steam? if it isnt already installed on the 2nd drive, then its a little stickier. Just copy the steam apps and userdata folders to a safe spot, reinstall steam, dont start, drop in the contents of those folders to the correct place, viola, no downloading or anything.

[AmEv]

Ehow.


File copy, still? Instead of cloning?

[diluzio91]

well, he did say he was going from mechanical to an ssd. so copying is probably a better solution, as with a mechanical drive cloned to an ssd you wouldn't have (the acronym eludes me) the garbage collection within windows 7.

[TheGreatSatan]

But cloning from a mechanical to an SSD will work fine right?

[diluzio91]

It would... you just lose trim, which may or may not auto config. My advice is to wait ane see if your ssd slows down... if it does.... nuke and pave.