Making the switch to Windows 7

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[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 1, 2003
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Hi All,

I've had XP and 7 dual booting since the beta testing stage but I kept my games on XP until the release candidate. I've got my new games going on 7 but my Steam library and lots of other games with important data are still on XP (BF2, CoD4, Fallout 3). I have a few questions about making the migration.

Can I drag my entire Steam folder over to my 7 partition? Would all of my games and data move comfortably with it? Is anything stored outside of the Steam directory that needs to get moved over as well?

Can I similarly drag my other games straight over or should I reinstall them from scratch? I imagine I'll need to track down the individual directories where the save games and configs are stored. Any idea on where stuff like my CoD4 unlocks/kits are?

Any help or tips you can give me on making the full switch over would be greatly appreciated!
 
It all depends on the game.

When I upgraded to 7, I just left steam where it was (on my data partition). I then hopped over to steampowered.com and downloaded the steam installer and installed it to the same directory. It was now usable in both XP and 7.

As far as the games -- the install files were there, but I believe the install files are game dependant meaning they go somewhere in your user proifle (C:\documents and settings\<user>\). They would have to be manually copied over and put into your 7 user profile (or you could try the migration tool - it says it doesn't work with XP, but I know for a fact that the new User State Migration Tool that you can download from Microsoft does work in XP, I just don't know if it will get your saved games...
 
basically if you're concerned, just download the steam client on your windows 7 , and then delete the steamapps folder in your Steam folder and then copy over your steamapps folder, that should do it.

You should back up your data though just in case, that's why I have external hard drives for that very purpose

once I made the decision to go from Vista ----> Windows 7, I backed everything up on an external, then reinstalled all my programs on windows 7 and then copied over my data

its' really a simple and mostly flawless system. Hopefully you see that an external hard drive is a good investment just in case Murphy lurks around the corner.
 
Unfortunately, XP is not on it's own little partition like I did with 7 so my XP-based games are unable to be accessed from 7. I've tried and I'm not comfortable with the warnings I get so I gave up trying that.

Re-installing and patching games will be annoying but I don't mind so much as long as I don't lose my saved games for games I haven't beaten yet. Fallout 3 is the only major one that I can think of since I'm pretty far into it but I know I'm not ready to put it down yet. There are a few other games that I will just beat under XP and uninstall when I'm done. I think moving my CoD4 MP profile over will be a piece of cake but I'm not sure what will happen with BF2. I think the stats and unlocks are stored server-side but patching will be a bit of a bitch. I've also read about some people having issues with BF2 on W7 so I might leave it where it is and start fresh on 7. If it works I'll just uninstall it from XP.
 
Fail said:
basically if you're concerned, just download the steam client on your windows 7 , and then delete the steamapps folder in your Steam folder and then copy over your steamapps folder, that should do it.

You should back up your data though just in case, that's why I have external hard drives for that very purpose

once I made the decision to go from Vista ----> Windows 7, I backed everything up on an external, then reinstalled all my programs on windows 7 and then copied over my data

its' really a simple and mostly flawless system. Hopefully you see that an external hard drive is a good investment just in case Murphy lurks around the corner.
Click to expand...

I'm going to back up saved games and stuff to my 1TB media drive before I wipe anything out. It just seemed to me that Steam could probably be dragged and dropped since I'm not aware of any registry keys associated with it. I know for games like Crysis that use SecurROM that would never fly though.
 
yeah you can copy your whole steam folder, but I did that myself without any errors a few times, but ONCE, and i mean ONCE, i did it, and it gave me problems, so I read a common solution other than deleting that infamous .blob file and letting the steam client update itself to fix many problems (tried it obviously), I decided to just reinstall the steam client freshly and then delete/copy/paste my steamapps folder.

Zero problems since then using that method.

That's how I recommend you do it, sir.
 
For steam I would simply install steam itself on the Win7 partition first so it can do all of its setup routines like dumping in all the registry keys etc, then once it's installed and completely updated, exit steam completely and drag across all your game data, when steam is next started it will simply check those games and flag them as "installed" in your list
 
I keep my steam folder on a separate hdd. if i have to re-install windows, all i have to do is install steam over itself.

i have only run into one issue, ARMA2 needs a registry key pointing to its install folder, so i keep a backup of that key in a reg file in my arma folder. all other games have worked with out a hitch.
 
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