Saving and playing games on external hard drive on multiple computers?

[TheBoomStickGamer]

So here's where I'm at I bought a external hard drive to save my Steam games to. So no problem downloaded Steam and saved it to external hard drive. All the games play fine on my laptop, which I downloaded Steam originally to and the games. My PC though it also has Steam doesn't recognize the games on the external hard drive and says they need to be redownloaded is this going to be the case for every computer I plug the external hard drive in? Or is there a way to download the games once and have every PC be able to read the games?

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Setup each PC's Steam (Settings > Downloads) to have a Steam Library Folder on that other Drive Letter. You can have as many as you want for the most part.

[TheBoomStickGamer]

i try to set is the steamapps, but it keeps saying that the file needs to be empty

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Rename the old folder; make new folder in Steam.
Exit Steam Client.
Delete the new folder, rename the old one again.

[TheBoomStickGamer]

Still didn't work... Are you able to post step by step from start to finish like downloading games on first PC to getting them to work on another. This is starting to piss me off..

[Bad 💀 Motha]

If done like I said; then after it is done; relaunch Steam Client; the games might be "grey" and result in an "Install Game" instead of "Play Game"; click Install and then select the location for your now secondary drive Steam Library Folder location; and Steam should see the game and say "Detecting Existing Game Files" and then it should simply Verify the game. Once that is done, it will be installed on that system.

I've done it this way for years and it has always worked as simple as this.

In Windows OS however (in Control Panel > Power Options) you will want to select High Performance power profile > then Edit it > under HDD make the sleep timer very lengthy.

Otherwise if the secondary drive goes to sleep; and you launch Steam, those games might not show as installed; due to Steam not able to look at that drive when asleep/low-power mode.

If Steam does have an issue writing to the Steam Library Folder Location on your External HDD when change system; exit Steam Client, go to that Steam folder on external HDD, right click it, click Properties, click the Security tab; and then select Users and also any UserNames for said system; edit the security for those to have "Full Control"

[DOGAO2511]

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

Setup each PC's Steam (Settings > Downloads) to have a Steam Library Folder on that other Drive Letter. You can have as many as you want for the most part.

Thank you. A simple path and worked. Thank you a lot. :) :) :)