Hard Drive Transfers: Snake Needs Your Guidance

[Solid Snake]

So your Friendly Neighborhood Snake who y'all respect and admire and privately adore is upgrading his PC, because that's what Snake's doin', and now his PC is going to be super-turbo-ultra charged to play games like Dragon Age: Inquisition in the most aesthetically sensual manner possible.

Radeon R9 290 be all like "Welcome to the PC Master Race Snake, you never chillin' with them console peasants again [*well actually just until Uncharted 4 comes out...]"

Snake's also getting a 3TB Hard Drive because aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwww yeah an immense library of imminently accessible content is the way to be, but now there's an issue.

The issue is simple: Snake's keeping the old 500 GB hard drive with Windows but he wants to move all Steam and Origin related content from the old drive to the new. Like we're gonna have a C drive and a D drive intertwined up in this business, but lots of content on that C drive needs to make a clean break. But not all the content! Documents and iTunes and even GOG.com content is probably staying with the OG HDD.

But, how precisely should this be done? How to ensure that Snake doesn't lose his precious save data? We're talking hundreds of hours of content that simply can't be lost unless you want to make Snake cry.

Is there some sort of guide on the Interwebs to assist folks with this process? Or, better yet, are you Human enough to assist Solid effin' Snake with incredible advice? Are you?

ARE YOU?!?!?!?!?

[Nikose Tyris]

Transferring your steam library can be a real pain in the ass.

TECHNICALLY you can just copy the folder over, point steam at the drive and say "hey, acknowledge this as a steamapps folder" but it's glitchy and not super user friendly.

http://www.stefanjones.ca/steam/ This is.

Don't know shit on origin tho.

Edit: Gee Nik could you maybe double check what you paste before you paste it, you shitnerd?

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_...7418-YUBN-8129

[Krylo]

First, take a high-power magnet and rub it over your old hard drive in a circular counter clockwise motion making sure to place it on the top of the HD. This will pick up all the old data. Now you simply run it clockwise over the new hard drive to deposit it. Delete unnecessary information on the classic manner and you are done.

[Solid Snake]

So my understanding is: First I uninstall Steam from my C: drive, then I reinstall Steam, tell it to install onto the D: drive, and hopefully I can then install my games library to that location?

...Which is awesome if that'll do the trick, but it leaves me with one gaping hole: Saved games that aren't on the Cloud. They're in some separate location on my C: drive, right? And I probably can't keep them there if I'm moving Steam to D:.
How do I make sure to transfer all those files?

...Also Krylo you are mean

[Krylo]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

...Which is awesome if that'll do the trick, but it leaves me with one gaping hole: Saved games that aren't on the Cloud. They're in some separate location on my C: drive, right? And I probably can't keep them there if I'm moving Steam to D:.
How do I make sure to transfer all those files?

There's two places games will generally save on your C drive.

The first you go into your Program Files/Steam/SteamApps/Common and hey there's all your games. Just move them someplace and then toss them in the same place in your new Steam install. This will make installing much faster too (you'll still have to tell steam to do it, but instead of downloading, steam will just spend a couple minutes realizing you already have the game).

The second is in your documents, in which case you're fine.

There's a third place as well, which is the Steam Cloud, which you don't have to worry about at all either way.

[Solid Snake]

Will I also have to uninstall all the individual games before uninstalling Steam, or will uninstalling Steam also uninstall all Steam games on my C: drive?

And, here's a crucial question: When I install Steam onto my D: drive, will it still default all saves to those C: drive folders? Like, as I'm reinstalling my Steam library onto D:, if I then attempted to play a game on my D: drive, and I saved my progress, is it defaulting to C: or creating a new folder in Documents with an identical name in D:?

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

It can be a time consuming process, but if you want to keep your steam stuff then bear with me on this one.

Firstly install a program called Teracopy. It blows the everliving shit out of windows in terms of sheer speed and effectiveness at moving stuff quickly. While not intrinsically required it'll save you a fuckload of time. Get you some.

Directions straight from steam itself:

The following instructions are a simple way to move your Steam installation along with your games:

Exit the Steam client application.
Browse to the Steam installation folder for the Steam installation you would like to move (C:\Program Files\Steam by default).
Delete all of the files and folders except the SteamApps folder and Steam.exe
Cut and paste the whole Steam folder to the new location, for example: D:\Games\Steam\
Launch Steam and log into your account.

Steam will briefly update and then you will be logged into your account. For installed games, verify your game cache files and you will be ready to play. All future game content will be downloaded to the new folder (D:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\ in this example)



If you encounter any errors during the move process or when Steam is launched from the new location, it may be necessary to perform a more thorough process:

Exit the Steam client application.
Browse to the Steam installation folder for the Steam installation (continuing the from the last section example, this would be the new location of D:\Games\Steam\.
Move the SteamApps folder from the Steam installation folder to your desktop.
Review the Uninstalling Steam topic for instructions to uninstall Steam (this must be done to remove your old Steam installation settings from the Windows Registry).
Review the Installing Steam topic for instructions to re-install Steam to the desired location.
Move the SteamApps folder into the new Steam installation folder to copy all of your downloaded game content, settings, and saved games to the new location.
Start Steam and log in to your existing Steam account to confirm that the move was successful.
For installed games, verify your game cache files and you will be ready to play.


Important:

If you are moving your Steam installation to a new hard drive and want to keep game saves/profiles for third party games that are not saved on Steam Cloud most of these can be found in your Documents folder: ~\Documents\[username]\My Games\. Moving this folder to the same location on your new hard drive will maintain your saves/profiles.

[BB]

You must must must transfer your steam games BEFORE you hit the Uninstall button on steam itself. It takes the whole ship with it if there's any games still installed.


Previous quotes and links mention it, but I wanted to reiterate it in big bold letters because missing that step is the least fun thing ever

[Solid Snake]

Wow, okay, we're takin' some detours.

So the good news is that both parts are installed and one -- the new GPU -- is fully operational. A little noisier than I anticipated and I'm going to have to get used to this new tone of hum that emanates from the machine, and I haven't really tried anything intensive as a test to see how well it works under pressure, but it's cool, I think.

The bad news is the hard drive. It's in there, there's a free port for it. But it isn't plugged in. I need to purchase something called a "data sata cable from motherboard to HDD." I have no idea what this is, but whatevs. The technician was very polite and showed me exactly where I'd need to plug it in, but daaaamn I'm still nervous about the likelihood I'll be doing this myself.

Everything -- like the Internet and whatnot -- is a tiny bit slower but I imagine that's because there's all these new kinks with the GPU, it's got a program that starts up automatically called "GPUTweak" that seems to monitor performance.

EDIT: I hope this new noise is something you get used to after hundreds of hours with your PC because, fuck, if it ain't, I'm going to be getting lotsa new headaches.

[Nikose Tyris]

One sec I'll get you a picture of the exact cable you need Snake

edit: http://www.primecables.com/p-305111-...FQaEaQodtQwA1w

Note the connector has an iiiiiiitty bitty L shape in it. Both ends will have that. You should be able to get it for a buck or less.