When I made this computer, I put a 60 gig SSD in it for my OS, since I hate waiting on the thing booting up. It worked like a charm for five years, but Windows has this annoying tendency to grow over time. Despite my best efforts otherwise, it now only has 500 MB free space. I plan to get a 120 something gig SSD to replace it (and keeping the 60 one to put games on I play regularly). However, over the years, I have collected a large collection of games. While movies and such can all be transferred to my external hard drive while the reinstalling is done, this doesn't really work for the games.
I was wondering if there is a way which allows me to not reformat my other hard drive and keep the games being playable. Does anyone know if this is possible and if so: how to do it?
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Since the new HD will be larger then the first, you can simply Ghost the original hard drive and put it onto the new hard drive. It takes a good bit of work, but your new hard drive would be an exact copy of the original, except it has more space. This, unfortunately, won't get rid of the "dead space" that has been created over the course of the years, but it will save all of your current games perfectly.
Otherwise, trying a new install and swapping.. well, it depends heavily on the game. If you're just wanting game saves, etc, you could backup all the game files - moving them from old drive to new temporarily - and reformat the old drive. Then install a fresh copy of the games, pointing their install location to your newly formatted 2nd drive. Now just move the backed-up game files back and overwrite the new installs. Thus, you get a new install with all the right registry, etc, but it has all of your old data. (Make sure you run game updates to make them match versions). This will actually work for most games. Unfortunately, badly written games still might not work because they misuse the registry, store info in odd spots, etc. But it's the best way I've found to do it outside of Ghosting. Note, this of course won't work if you don't have the discs/etc to reinstall the games - unless you're really lucky with the game and it can run on the files alone without any added install info.
The first (Ghosting) is the safest from a gaming stand point.
The second (reformat, reinstall, copy back) is a better way to make sure windows starts up and works beautifully again.
This is why i always keep windows on its own physical drive (ssd). Helps with seek times as well (swap space on an ssd with gamedata coming off another drive made more difference than i had hoped) Installing games to their own partitition of a larger drive. Usually have to reinstall games (registry entries) but save games/other data is kept intact this way.
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I do have a second hdd in there indeed, to keep al my other stuff on, which contains everything which is not Windows.
So you have 1 Hard drive with Windows, another hard drive with games and then a new harddrive you want to put new windows on? If that is the case. You should be able to just install windows on the new drive and then setup your game HD as a slave to it the way it is currently. Your game drive doesnt have anything windows on it, it's just a file system in a format that windows understands. You'd be able to plug that into "any" system and play the games.
If you are using multiple drives for your computer to function you will need to ghost your windows drive. If you just rip out and reinstall windows on a new SSD it will know nothing about the installed games on another drive, which means you will need to reinstall all of your games. Most games (and other programs) should handle this fine... some however will throw fits and blow up on you.
Your best bet is to ghost your original Windows drive onto the new drive. The process is EXTREMELY simple to do these days, it is usually a few simple clicks and some time while it does its thing. After you have ghosted your old drive you can simply replace the old with the new and be good to go. Any potential data you might save by doing a reinstall (such as all of the temporary files held by windows installer/updates) will just end up repopulating itself anyway so you only save space over a short amount of time.
I used ghost and other copying techniques at my old job fairly extensively, feel free to PM me with questions.
When I made this computer, I put a 60 gig SSD in it for my OS, since I hate waiting on the thing booting up. It worked like a charm for five years, but Windows has this annoying tendency to grow over time. Despite my best efforts otherwise, it now only has 500 MB free space. I plan to get a 120 something gig SSD to replace it (and keeping the 60 one to put games on I play regularly). However, over the years, I have collected a large collection of games. While movies and such can all be transferred to my external hard drive while the reinstalling is done, this doesn't really work for the games.
I was wondering if there is a way which allows me to not reformat my other hard drive and keep the games being playable. Does anyone know if this is possible and if so: how to do it?
Otherwise, trying a new install and swapping.. well, it depends heavily on the game. If you're just wanting game saves, etc, you could backup all the game files - moving them from old drive to new temporarily - and reformat the old drive. Then install a fresh copy of the games, pointing their install location to your newly formatted 2nd drive. Now just move the backed-up game files back and overwrite the new installs. Thus, you get a new install with all the right registry, etc, but it has all of your old data. (Make sure you run game updates to make them match versions). This will actually work for most games. Unfortunately, badly written games still might not work because they misuse the registry, store info in odd spots, etc. But it's the best way I've found to do it outside of Ghosting. Note, this of course won't work if you don't have the discs/etc to reinstall the games - unless you're really lucky with the game and it can run on the files alone without any added install info.
The first (Ghosting) is the safest from a gaming stand point.
The second (reformat, reinstall, copy back) is a better way to make sure windows starts up and works beautifully again.
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So you have 1 Hard drive with Windows, another hard drive with games and then a new harddrive you want to put new windows on? If that is the case. You should be able to just install windows on the new drive and then setup your game HD as a slave to it the way it is currently. Your game drive doesnt have anything windows on it, it's just a file system in a format that windows understands. You'd be able to plug that into "any" system and play the games.
Your best bet is to ghost your original Windows drive onto the new drive. The process is EXTREMELY simple to do these days, it is usually a few simple clicks and some time while it does its thing. After you have ghosted your old drive you can simply replace the old with the new and be good to go. Any potential data you might save by doing a reinstall (such as all of the temporary files held by windows installer/updates) will just end up repopulating itself anyway so you only save space over a short amount of time.
I used ghost and other copying techniques at my old job fairly extensively, feel free to PM me with questions.
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