Transfering games to new extra drive

Discussion in 'Software' started by thunderbird, Aug 25, 2006.

  1. thunderbird

    thunderbird Bit Poster

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    I'm about to install a new larger HD in my daughters PC. As all her games have managed to fill the C drive. How can I copy them across so that they work , without having to re-install them?. I know they'll copy across fine, but will they work? or do I need to tell XP Pro where they've gone and where to look for the files?
     
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  2. Mr.Cheeks

    Mr.Cheeks 1st ever Gold Member! Gold Member

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    Some games will work, and some games needs to be reinstalled. but make sure you make a copy game saves incase they get overidded...

    I had the same problem, now i always install my games on a different drive.
     
  3. Boycie
    Honorary Member

    Boycie Senior Beer Tester

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    I am a big fan of Acronis Image drive for exactly this type of situation.
    You will need a surplus drive to put the image of the old drive on. Use a third party utility to format and partition the new drive and then restore the image on to your new shiny, bigger drive.

    Si
     
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  4. Mr.Cheeks

    Mr.Cheeks 1st ever Gold Member! Gold Member

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    so will you have a dup copy of everything on your new drive?
    will you have to recreate your shortcuts on your desktop?
     
  5. Boycie
    Honorary Member

    Boycie Senior Beer Tester

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    no, you won't have to create anything.

    example;

    I make a full back up of my machine (you can select a partition, some, or selected folders) to my Lacie external drive. The same day, the hard drive in my desktop goes pop.
    I buy another IDE drive, partion and format it using something like the Maxtor free utility and then boot to the Acronis image OS on CD. It will then find my USB drive and restore the image of my machine on the new hard drive. Within an hour, i am back to normal. :biggrin

    Si
     
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  6. wizard

    wizard Petabyte Poster

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    I'll have to look at the site closer looks interesting and price isn't too shabby either :)
     
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  7. Boycie
    Honorary Member

    Boycie Senior Beer Tester

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    Personally, i think it is well worth the money.

    Si
     
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  8. Baba O'Riley

    Baba O'Riley Gigabyte Poster

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    Hi guys, I've just come out of a self-imposed break from CF for this post so I hope it's of some use.

    Drive Image XML
    will do exactly the same thing and it's completely free. There is also a Bart PE plugin for it which makes it super useful in my opinion. 8)
     
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  9. Boycie
    Honorary Member

    Boycie Senior Beer Tester

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    Baba,

    Excellent, thanks!

    Si
     
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  10. r.h.lee

    r.h.lee Gigabyte Poster

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    thunderbird,

    Why not use a program like Ghost to copy the old hard drive to the new larger hard drive? Then use the old hard drive as a slave to the new larger hard drive to hold data files?

    Ghost would maintain the file relations of already installed software, while giving it the full freedom of the extra free space on the new larger hard drive. It'll solve both your problems of free space on C: while avoiding software reinstall.

    I hope this helps.
     
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  11. thunderbird

    thunderbird Bit Poster

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    Thank you all for your suggestions. Off home know to get things sorted.
    Just got to pry her hands off it first.
     
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  12. thunderbird

    thunderbird Bit Poster

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    OK, so discovered I had Norton Ghost in the Systemworks disc I had.
    So should be a doddle right? Wrong.
    New drive is installed and formatted, Windows reads it no problem.
    But if I try to clone I get an error message which says that it cannot defrag the virtual partition. Any clues on this please?
     
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  13. thunderbird

    thunderbird Bit Poster

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    OK, so I used Ghost and it copied everything over to the new drive. I set the new drive as master and the old as slave. It boots fine from the new drive, but for some reason I couldn'tr get the games sound to work. So I deleted the games from the old drive and then they wouldn't play at all. So had to re-install on the new drive. (which was what I was trying to avoid) So before I wipe the old drive, is there something I'm missing?. Also the new drive is E; and the old drive still C: Surely setting the new one as master should make it C: or is that too obvious?
    Any suggestions would be greatly recd. Thanks T-Bird
     
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  14. Baba O'Riley

    Baba O'Riley Gigabyte Poster

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    I suspect your problems arise from having two drives with the same image on it. I would have copied the image, shut down the PC and removed the old drive. It should be assigned the letter C: then. Not sure if that would fix the sound problems but I have seen some funny behaviour in situations like this. I tried it once and it seems Windows became convinced it had a mirrored RAID array installed and wouldn't boot without RAID drivers being installed.
     
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  15. nugget
    Honorary Member

    nugget Junior toady

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    As Baba put it the problem is that when you booted up for the first time after cloning the disk it found 2 C drives. It then remapped the second HDD to be E drive ( D drive being the cd rom?). Then when you manage to boot from the second HDD everything that is running (games for example) are all looking for paths that do not exist any more.
     
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  16. Raffaz

    Raffaz Kebab Lover Gold Member

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    Just curious here, is there a reason why ya cant just partition/format ya new drive and then transfer everything over (cant remember off hand but i think ghost allows this).

    Mick
     
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