Re-install all games after hardware upgrade?

[joe.sn666]

Hi!

I am updating my hardware (new mainboard/cpu). Is it recommended to re-install all steam games after the fresh windows-installation? To spare time and traffic I rather like to store the games on my HDD and drag the games back to the new installed steam folder...

thanks

[Omega]

No, there is no reason to reinstall your games.

You can move games between Windows installs and systems without any issues.


Copy the entire Steamapps folder, that way you will grab both the games and the appmanifests.

[joe.sn666]

thanks !

[√ Vulpium Prima™]

It's sometimes necessary to Verify Integrity of Game Files™ for some games after moving between systems, though. Steam game files seem particularly prone to corruption when being moved, but a well-timed VIGF™ will resolve it.

[Vince ✟]

Don't lose your .acf files unless you're ready to bang your head on the desk for hours.

[Arya]

Make sure you re-install Windows and any drivers, I recommend just formatting the entire main drive. Otherwise you can have some really annoying problems, especially with Windows itself.

Beyond that, everything else can come over intact, including your games and anything else like pics and music.

[√ Vulpium Prima™]

Wolfey, reformatting the entire drive is potentially excessive. If the drive has multiple partitions, reformatting only the System partition eliminates all possible issues of the type you're describing with only minimal loss of data (leaving any data partitions on the drive intact).

[Arya]

Originally posted by VKₓ Raverud √ ꜛFox Oneꜛ:

Wolfey, reformatting the entire drive is potentially excessive. If the drive has multiple partitions, reformatting only the System partition eliminates all possible issues of the type you're describing with only minimal loss of data (leaving any data partitions on the drive intact).

Fair enough.

[[☥] - CJ -]

If you are reinstalling Windows, its best to disconnect the game drive until after its installed so as to not mess up boot sectors/manager etc so on.

It is true that a previous Windows install may not allow the change of the motherboard and CPU without requiring it to be reformatted. so its always best to backup anything you want to keep either on a secondary drive or a USB stick. You will know if this is the case if when you try to enter Windows all you get is a blue screen.

If you have a secondary drive for games and storage you could just have the games installed to that drive instead of moving them back to the OS drive or SSD if thats the case. Many games are perfectly fine on an HDD and only a select number of games are best on an SSD.

Also keep in mind that if you do have to reinstall Windows chances are you'll lose many of your game saves, Steam Cloud isnt 100% in restoring your saves. So unless you have already started, using Game Save Manager would be a good idea just in case.


As there wasnt a lot of information to go on, i merely stated a few different situations.

[Omega]

Originally posted by VKₓ Raverud √ ꜛFox Oneꜛ:

It's sometimes necessary to Verify Integrity of Game Files™ for some games after moving between systems, though. Steam game files seem particularly prone to corruption when being moved, but a well-timed VIGF™ will resolve it.

Steam will do that automatically when a new library folder is added and when a game is "installed" and detected if the appmanifests are not copied over.

No Steam games are not prone to corruption. No data is "prone to curruption" when copied, if stuff is corrupting when you copy it you likely have deffective hardware in your machine.

You are aware that on a default Windows install the system partition holds ALL your personal data and programs right? You should wipe the entire drive to make sure the Windows installer doesn't mess up the partitioning of the drive, and there is not reason to save the bootloader etc.. anyway when reinstalling Windows.

"A well timed VIGF"? A what?


All this stuff you are recomending doesn't make any sense. And even if OP followed your "advice" he would still end up wiping his entire drive and has to move his games over to a external drive anyway.

[√ Vulpium Prima™]

Certain data types are more prone to corruption than others. Any encrypted, compressed or encoded file, for instance, may be completely unreadable if a single bit is flipped, whereas in a text file, a single bit flip would only affect the character the bit is storing a part of, not the entire file. You'd still be able to read everything, but you may have to figure out that that "g" was meant to be an "h" because one of its bits got flipped.

Most game files are of course compressed or encoded, making them more prone to "whole-file corruption" than regular text files. Nonetheless, your point is taken, no file is on its own more likely to become corrupted than another, however when a program such as Steam is managing the files the chance of corruption increases simply due to the added complexity of the process and the added actions being performed on the data.

I've moved many Steam game folders between different computers, and every single time I've had to VIGF (Verify Integrity of Game Files) a couple of games (but not all) afterwards. Possibly this is due to some Steam process changing or updating the files while they are being copied, as I tend to be somewhat reckless with which programs I leave running while copying/moving.

Yes, I am aware that Windows defaults to a silly partition table when installing. However, I'd challenge you to find a techie recommending that you put all your files in the System partition. I will not be held accountable for Microsoft's poorly chosen default settings. On the other hand, through the thousands of Windows installs I performed for students while working at a high school, I've never once experienced the Windows installer bungling up the partiton table (no, we were of course not using the Windows default single-partition setup). I'd like to see a reference for that, as I've only ever seen it when installing very obscure operating systems like ReactOS. There are also conceivable reasons for wanting to save the bootloader, such as having a dual-boot configuration or custom bootloader installed (I ran Windows XP on GRUB after struggling with getting the Windows bootloader to load from an early PCI-e SSD).

The only hardware defect in this computer is that the lights on the RAM stick in slot DIMM_A2 sometimes desync from the other lights when the computer is locked (or more accurately, when user mode drivers such as the ones used by iCUE/AURA cannot run, or if said drivers are forcefully killed). There are certainly no drive defects, and I can provide SMART data to back this up.

[√ Vulpium Prima™]

I haven't seen Steam VIGF automatically when adding game folders before, mayhaps this is a recently added feature? I will run a test immediately with deliberately corrupted files to see if Steam will fix them when adding this game folder.

[Omega]

Originally posted by VKₓ Raverud √ ꜛFox Oneꜛ:

I haven't seen Steam VIGF automatically when adding game folders before, mayhaps this is a recently added feature? I will run a test immediately with deliberately corrupted files to see if Steam will fix them when adding this game folder.

I think I was incorrect about Steam running a integity check by default. It's just downloading some stuff, probably icons etc.. for all games in the external game folder. No idea why sleep deprived me assumed it to be checking file integrity this morning, I hadn't had coffee yet that's probably why.

[√ Vulpium Prima™]

No problem at all, coffee withdrawal can do strange things to a man. I've hit a bit of a wall with Steam's new "feature" of refusing to have multiple Steam Library folders per drive ("Steam will automatically manage multiple game installs in a single folder" woohoo so helpful), so I am having to install games on a flash drive to test this - due to its limited write performance, it will take a while.

[Omega]

Originally posted by VKₓ Raverud √ ꜛFox Oneꜛ:

SNIP

Corruption = corruption, it doesn't matter if the application is still functional after it or not.

I rarely have to do a file iintegrity check when moving them between Windows installs and PCs.


The very fact that WIndows doesn't let you manually partition the drive and mount the file system is the issue. The only OS I have had issues with it messing up the partition table is Solus, need to format the drive after installing Solus before I can repartition it. I also have my system partition and the home partition seperated on my Arch and OpenSUSE installs, I would prefer to be able to do something similar with Windows as well.

But I don't keep any important data on the PC period. I don't have any really important data at all, my PC can explode and the cloud can catch fire, I can live without this stuff.

[√ Vulpium Prima™]

You are able to do that with Windows, as long as you forgo the default partition setup and go with multiple partitions at install-time, or resize and add partitions afterwards, or have multiple drives. On Windows 7 and forward, you can manually set the locations of your home folders (Documents, Music etc) to be on a different partition or drive if you like. Simply right click the folder -> Properties -> Location. On earlier versions of Windows, or if you don't want to use the graphical way (for instance because it causes havoc with certain applications, like it does for me) you can use Directory Junctions (i.e. "del Documents", then "mklink /J Documents D:\Home\Documents") to achieve the same goal (obviously backup Documents before you delete it, otherwise Catastrophic Data Loss™ will ensue). At least on Windows 7 and forward, the command prompt must be running as Administrator to allow you to perform these commands, and on some installs you will need Safe Mode to delete the original Home folders. I'm not sure what you mean about Windows not allowing you to manually partition the drive, it's simply a matter of pressing "New..." on the partitioning screen. Later versions do create a small 100-300MB partition which you cannot opt out of, but I don't see how that differs from say the SWAP partition on Linux (although of course its usecase is vastly different).

I don't see how a problem that is admittedly specific to Solus is applicable to a question about Windows.