Transferring Games Files Question

[MatTheCat]

Having recently upped my gfx card to a 4870, I now fancy having a sniff at Vista purely for DX10 purposes.

I have two 360Gb Hard drives (HD1 + HD2), 1 with XP64 and utilities, drivers, etc etc, the other laden down with music files, downloads, and my Game installations.

Since it is my preference that I use 1 HD for XP64 and the other for Vista Ultimate 64bit, I am faced with either having to install every single game I own onto HD1, or copying them over from HD2, to HD1.

This may sound like a silly question, but is there any reason why I shouldn't just copy the games directories fully onto HD1 rather than reinstalling every single game all over again?

 

[WhiteLotus]

i think you may have to re-insert the game key but that's it.

 

[Polarman]

Not sure that a simple transfer will work since a bunch of things is written in the registery.

It may be a pain in the arse, but a clean install is always the best thing to do.

 

[AsRock]

Depends on the game like Armed Assault you can and with Half Life 2 you can. Remember most games put your saves \ cfg files in my documents these days

 

[psyko12]

^ True, most profiles and game saves are put in users directory, plus if you just copy pasted, you'd need to enter your keys for the games.

Here's what I do before formatting, re-inst os's back up my profiles/saves and keys.
Then when the os is all set up, I just re-install/re patch everything and copy the backed up profiles/configs/saves to the destined folders. I know it's tedious but it reduces a cause of problem for me.

 

[MatTheCat]

Hrmmm..

I think that if I am to try out Vista for a bit of DX10 action, then I will be looking at installing it on same HD as XP64 in seperate partition.....tedium is one thing I can do without for the time being....My Time is Prime Time!