Will I need to re-install games on a secondary hard drive after formatting the OS drive?

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TyTonusBurman

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Jul 13, 2013
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Hey everyone,

A quick question here:

I have my operating system on one hard drive, and the vast majority of my games on a secondary drive.

If I format the OS drive, and install a clean version of windows, will I need to manually reinstall every game?

I know that nothing will happen to the files themselves on the game drive, but won't the pointers in the registry and some other system files that are used to run the games, be cleared? Won't this mean that i have to reinstall the games so that those pointers are created again and the game can run?

If so, is there any way around this? Because I would really like to not have to install every game, and ensure that its save info is carried over safely.

Thanks in advance!
 
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Jaxem


Registries can be exported and imported, but i wholeheartedly recomment not doing...
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Jaxem

Jaxem

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Jul 22, 2013
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It depends on how they're installed, steam and uplay keep their install info separate and you can just point your new steam/uplay install to the old directory and take off playing. If they're stand alone installs, or on Origin (though there is still a way to do it with Origin, just more of a pain), then you'll need to re-install, stand alone's especially because they write to the registry and other locations on the system drive that you will have lost, but will need.
 
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TyTonusBurman

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Jul 13, 2013
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Jaxem,

Is there any way to copy the current registry, and then 'paste' it back over the new one to avoid that issue?

Or is there another way to bypass this problem?

 
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Jaxem

Jaxem

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Jul 22, 2013
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Registries can be exported and imported, but i wholeheartedly recomment not doing that. I don't know of any way around it though, i just did an upgrade of my main machine to Win 8.1 and had to re-install a few games. If there were a good way to do it, it would be well known.

Save files can usually be pasted into new installs without issue, and some games might let you start an install/download then stop it and paste in a fully installed directory (you'd get the registry setup correctly that way), but that would vary from game to game, so there's no standard method/answer
 
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Monty1

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Jun 7, 2014
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Hi i've tried in the past to just go to computer and select the secondary hdd look for users and find your steam shortcut in the account you set it up in i.e. jack copy and paste the shortcut on your desktop and you should to access steam and play your games from there.
 
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