Want to move some games to an SSD from a HDD, scared tho

[Master Guns]

My steam library isn't super impressive, only 67 games. But I want to get an SSD card and put a lot of games on it for faster load times, especially my heavily modded games like Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 4.

Now, these games are so absurdly temperamental with modding paths and whatnot I just am afraid I'm going to break something hardcore. I mean the mods I have. I have a -lot- of mods installed in especially Morrowind and Skyrim, and I've had issues in the past from trying to "move" these files to other sources and it just annihilated my shit and I had to mod the games all over from scratch.

What's the best way to move games like this?

[alturic]

My steam library isn't super impressive, only 67 games. But I want to get an SSD card and put a lot of games on it for faster load times, especially my heavily modded games like Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 4.

Now, these games are so absurdly temperamental with modding paths and whatnot I just am afraid I'm going to break something hardcore. I mean the mods I have. I have a -lot- of mods installed in especially Morrowind and Skyrim, and I've had issues in the past from trying to "move" these files to other sources and it just annihilated my shit and I had to mod the games all over from scratch.

What's the best way to move games like this?

Are you going to be replacing the HDD for the SSD? If so, you wouldn't have to change anything. If you literally open the drive in explorer, Ctrl-A and then Ctrl-C, open the SSD in explorer and Ctrl-V it will copy everything in-place to the new drive. If you then remove the HDD and assign the SSD to the HDD's old drive letter nothing needs to be done.

If the current HDD is assigned to D:, and your Steam Library is under D:/Games/Steam, and you want to have the SSD be assigned to E:, and do E:/Steam Library, you'll have one hell of a time having to edit everything manually however.

Edit: So I would do the following.

HDD (is a secondary drive I imagine?) is assigned to letter D.
SSD is assigned to letter E.
Open D: in explorer, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C.
Open E: in explorer, Ctrl-V. And wait until it finishes a presumably lengthy transfer.
Shut-down the PC.
Unplug the HDD's power.
Turn on, if it doesn't automatically, assign the SSD to letter D, fire up a game and you should be done.
After validating every game and mod works you can do whatever with the HDD.

It really would be that simple if you just copy everything in-place from the HDD to the SSD and then assign the SSD to the HDD's old drive letter. However, those must be some horrible games and/or mods that require absolute paths to their directories instead of relative paths.

[abracmike]

First, this assumes you want to keep both drives in the machine. If not, follow the post above by alturic instead

Steam makes this fairly straight forward to do if you have both drives connected to the PC.

First you need to register a steam library on the new SSD:
Steam -> Settings
Downloads
Steam Library folders -> Add a new one here on your SSD

Then,for the games you'd like to move:
Right click -> Properties
Local Files
Move Install Folder -> Select the newly created library

This should hopefully preserve mod stuff as well since it's a wholesale shift

[lloose]

First, this assumes you want to keep both drives in the machine. If not, follow the post above by alturic instead

Steam makes this fairly straight forward to do if you have both drives connected to the PC.

First you need to register a steam library on the new SSD:
Steam -> Settings
Downloads
Steam Library folders -> Add a new one here on your SSD

Then,for the games you'd like to move:
Right click -> Properties
Local Files
Move Install Folder -> Select the newly created library

This should hopefully preserve mod stuff as well since it's a wholesale shift

You dont even have to do that. You can just copy and paste the entire steam folder on the SSD. I have been using the same Steam install on a 2nd SSD for several installs. The first time you run it, it gives you a warning saying that it needs to add itself back to the registry. After that, its fine.

[abracmike]

You dont even have to do that. You can just copy and paste the entire steam folder on the SSD. I have been using the same Steam install on a 2nd SSD for several installs. The first time you run it, it gives you a warning saying that it needs to add itself back to the registry. After that, its fine.

True if you move the entire steam folder.
I took the OP to mean only some games, rather than the whole thing.

[Master Guns]

What about my mod managers? Is moving my games from an HDD to an SSD going to corrupt their paths? Do I have to move the manager itself to the SSD?

[lloose]

What about my mod managers? Is moving my games from an HDD to an SSD going to corrupt their paths? Do I have to move the manager itself to the SSD?

You will have to probably redirect the mod manager to the steam folder location.

[Twoddle]

What about my mod managers? Is moving my games from an HDD to an SSD going to corrupt their paths? Do I have to move the manager itself to the SSD?

Mod managers are usually fancy bloatware. Do your addons manually.

[alturic]

What about my mod managers? Is moving my games from an HDD to an SSD going to corrupt their paths? Do I have to move the manager itself to the SSD?

Without knowing what specifically you mean about the temperamental modding paths, the absolute only way you won't have to worry about path issues is copying the entire directory structure from HDD to SSD as I mentioned.

I would certainly like to think the paths are relative and not absolute, but if that was the case I don't think you'd be talking about modding paths considering as long as you knew how to install mods, say like WoW they go into \Interface\AddOns, you wouldn't have path issues outside of simply putting the mod in the wrong directory.

My way 100% ensures you wouldn't have any issues regardless, and yes, still allows you to keep the HDD for crusty backups if you want.

I'm fairly confident my way and abracmike's way will achieve the same results you are looking for without having issues with mods. Again, just don't alter anything on the HDD at all until you have verified everything works on the SSD.

[acehud]

I recently changed my HDD for an SSD. I already had an SSD where my OS is located so - like you - I had to mainly move games/films/etc from one to the other.

Whilst i didn't have as many heavily modded games as you, I did have maybe 10 games I moved over from steam. I literally just copy/pasted the folders from the HDD into the SSD via an SATA to USB cable. Keep in mind the speed is limited to the slowest component - i.e. the HDD so it was transferring with like 50mb/s and I moved over 1TB of data so that took a while. I'd recommend to do it for max 200gb chunks so that you can do stuff in between the move.

Your steam desktop shortcuts will break, and you'd need to manually fix them. I don't remember exactly what I did, I believe I had to find a specific folder in the steam directory where the icons for the shortcuts are stored and manually assign to each game. Non-steam games was easy to fix as you just find the location of the .exe on the new folder.

If you've kept the mods saved in the same place as the game folders I don't see any issues coming forward.