new hard drive & steam issue

[Elessar Telrunya]

Back in February I added a second hard drive to my desktop since my primary hard drive was pretty quickly filling up, and I started moving a lot of things over from my C drive to the new hard drive, including a lot of games, since those were taking up the bulk of the space. So I wholesale dumped a lot of folders - Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, iTunes, etc. including my Steam folders onto the new hard drive and didn't think much of it at the time.

Fast forward to now, and I've started noticing some issues with certain Steam games when I try to run them. I'll run them and the program will go into full screen for a moment while it loads and then cut out with a "suchandsuch.exe has suddenly stopped working" error message. This has only happened with my Steam games that I had before I installed the new hard drive, but not with all of them (i.e. Portal works just fine, but Thief: The Dark Project doesn't, both of which I've had for ages). I'm not sure why moving hard drives would affect some games but not others, but I can't think of anything else specific that might have started causing problems.

Any thoughts on fixes or should I suck it up and start reinstalling the games that don't work?

[Mercy]

You should reinstall the games, because with Steam the games are probably trying to access the file paths of the games. You could try the repair tool and see if that works. Otherwise it's just time to reinstall.

[Mo]

Basically what Mercy said.  There is a proper process to move Steam content by backing up and restoring to a new location.  I do not think you should just cut and paste the folder.  I'd probably blow away all the content and redownload all from scratch.  Follow instructions on how to reinstall all Steam games.

[Elessar Telrunya]

Yeah, doing that now. From what I can tell only the first two Thief games were affected though. Weird.

[Soul Sojourner]

I had something like this happen, too. I found a workaround, but I honestly can't remember what I did and I know it took me awhile to get it figured out. So, yeah, better off reinstalling. And if it's the first two thief games, why bother? I could understand if you didn't want to re-download a 35 GB game. Just grab your saves and whatnot and go with it.

[420]

When we got our gaming laptop I learned a couple things about Steam games:

Always reinstall them on a new machine/hard drive instead of just copying over the files.

Certain games, like Wolfenstein: New Order, need to have their save games copied over manually. Other games just save to the cloud and don't need the save games copied over.

-420

[Elessar Telrunya]

Yeah, seems to be the case. Anyway, it's fixed now. I'm just glad it wasn't everything from before last February. Thanks guys!

[Soul Sojourner]

I agree in most situations, 420. But when it comes to something like Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. I'll be finding a different way, because I don't feel like re-downloading 64 GB. Haha.

I think I did what Mo talked about. I think I copied and pasted them, but had issues with a few games, and ended up booting the other drive and using Steam's backup and restore feature for those games.