New PC with old hard drive with steam games on it as a secondary drive

[Chicken_Adobo7]

Hey, Ive built a new PC and I want to play games on it so I got my old HDD on my old computer with steam games installed in it and when I open up steam it just says reinstall game, and I dont want to do that because my internet is slow and if I do it it will take me a month just to intsall my games which is already installed on my old HDD

[ReBoot]

Move Steam to where you want the games to be, then move the games into that Steam folder (obviously into the appropriate subfolder). Start Steam then.

[Chicken_Adobo7]

How do I move it? Sorry im new to this type of stuff

[ReBoot]

The same way you move anything. You can cut and paste it, you can use the "move" command in Explorer's tool bar, you can use the move console command. Literally any way to move files around. Is that the first time you're using a PC?
https://www.bing.com/search?q=move+files+on+windows

[Chicken_Adobo7]

No, I mean how do I play the games which are on my old HDD to my new PC. Im using the old HDD as my secondary drive and my new PC has new SSD, I guess steam cant recognize my games on my old HDD

[ReBoot]

As I said

Originally posted by ReBoot:

Move Steam to where you want the games to be, then move the games into that Steam folder (obviously into the appropriate subfolder). Start Steam then.

That "where you want the games to be" would be the HDD.

[Dr.Shadowds 🐉]

Originally posted by Chicken_Adobo7:

No, I mean how do I play the games which are on my old HDD to my new PC. Im using the old HDD as my secondary drive and my new PC has new SSD, I guess steam cant recognize my games on my old HDD

You install Steam on your SSD right?

You're going to open your folder Explorer, go where you have your games on your HDD for Steam. Now on the HDD for it Steam folder, go into it, right click on "steamapp" folder click cut, now go to Steam folder for your SSD, now go into Steam folder, click paste, and it will ask if you want to overwrite, click yes, now once it finished, launch Steam. You just moved your games that simple.

[< blank >]

Steam > Setting > Downloads > Steam Library Folders > Select your old library pathway in Old HDD > Restart

[Chicken_Adobo7]

I appreciate all your comments guys, I’ve already solved it. I just downloaded steam on my hdd instead of my ssd works fine. Thank you guys for the comments❤️

[B.I.G]

nice

[Dr. Lalaoz]

For anyone finding this thread years later; an alternative solution to the one OP found is to boot up steam, go into steams settings, then Downloads > Steam Library Folders and then add the "old" drive to the new steam install. it wont recognize it automatically.

steam will then create a new folder in that drive called "Steam" if a folder already exists with that name then it will be named "SteamLibrary" instead.

all that maters is you know which folder is the new one, ie: which one doesn't have any games in it.

Once you've done that, exit steam fully and then rename or delete the empty folder. then rename the full folder to the new name and start steam.

[ball sweat drippin down my legs]

Originally posted by < blank >:

Steam > Setting > Downloads > Steam Library Folders > Select your old library pathway in Old HDD > Restart

spillin grool cuz this was the method

[BlazingVoid]

Originally posted by < blank >:

Steam > Setting > Downloads > Steam Library Folders > Select your old library pathway in Old HDD > Restart

Super Star. Thanks for saving me time and hassle.

[76561199496784570]

if you ever suffer a library corruption issue, this will also allow you to reconnect the games currently on your harddrive without redownloading everything, it will save you alot of time using steam library folders.

[vikingman33]

This information is no longer valid. There is no option to tell Steam to look at a specific folder for Steam games. It simply creates the new folder and subfolder on the drive. After it's created there is no option to browse to a different folder. The best option I have found is after it creates the new Steam folders, copy and paste the entire game folder from the old folder into the new Steam folder then it may work. These options are now in Steam>Settings>Storage . Trying to add a new folder and telling Steam you want to add a specific location does not work unless the location is empty. It refuses to look at old steam folders and integrate them. So far the only option I am seeing is to copy the entire SteamApps folder content onto a newly created SteamLibrary/steamapps folder that is empty. If you have a large amount of games on the old HD it's going to take a bit. Even on my brand new system with all SSD's it's taking about 15 mins to copy from one SSD to another for about 350GB.

[Steve]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.