Moving SFM to a new hard drive

[LordTrinen]

I have two hard drives on my computer, the C Drive where most programs are stored and a much larger E Drive.

Most of my Steam games and other files I have stored on my E Drive because of the larger memory capacity. But when I got my computer I installed SFM on my C Drive. Sadly with all the models I've installed since then my C Drive is almost out of memory. I would like to move SFM to my E Drive. It is a large file thanks to all the stuff I've gotten from the Workshop and from models I've downloaded from elsewhere and manually installed.

Can anyone give me advice on moving my stuff to a different hard drive? How to tell my computer to look at a different drive and how to easily move everything over?

[episoder]

The easiest is to just move the content (materials, models, sounds, whatever) in entire mod folders and add the search pathes in the gameinfo txt. like this

			game	"D:\sfm_content\usermod"
			game	"D:\sfm_content\sfmbeta"

You could even move the whole usermod folder. You just gotta keep the gameinfo txt (and the cfg perhaps) in the common folder. That gameconfig is all what sfm needs to find the pathes.

[Pte Jack]

No, no, no. I would never do that. It's insane. Sorry Episoder, but I can't let that one slide.

If you know what your doing with Steam File Systems they can be moved around and shuffled between drives. BUT, you HAVE to know what you're doing. (I do it between computers so I don't have to download hundreds of gigs.)

If you're not sure, then this is the best and safest method for moving a Steam game from one drive to another... (If the option is available in the client.)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1408621097

[episoder]

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

No, no, no. I would never do that. It's insane. Sorry Episoder, but I can't let that one slide.

Just because you wouldn't do that doesn't mean it's wrong. I'm aware that this library function exists and moving just the content may not be enough. You gotta have gigs of user content for this to make a dent. The bulk is sfm and the tf2 and the hl2 data itself. They could be moved with the same mod folder method tho. If anybody boots sfm, only the sfm bin, platform and sdktools folders and the usermod gameconfig txt matters, if that is set as the primary mod. It's all loaded from that point where it's got the search pathes from the gameconfig.

[Pte Jack]

Nope, I agree with you on that but I’ve tried splitting SFM up across drives like that before. I ended up having to move things back together because of weird behaviours in imported models, materials and map problems. I had all my custom stuff on one drive, native stuff on the install drive but things still pooched up. I have even gone so far as to the making system folders being able to be given lower priorities. Like I said, as long as you know what you’re doing, anything is doable. But because of first hand experience and the behaviours after trying it, that why I say, no no no, I wouldn’t do that.