Steam not launching from another drive

[Hassan83]

I recently installed a 120gb SSD in my system. I have my 500gb HDD from before and did a clean install of Windows 10 on my SSD. Most of the apps from my HDD work when I boot from my SSD however that is not the case for Steam. Any game that I open goes through this "first time setup window" and when I launch it, none of my saves are there. I rebooted onto my HDD and everything was working completely fine. Any fix for this? I don't want to have to reinstall my games just so I can access them when booting from another drive

 

[R_1]

did you install steam under windows 10? did you update the location of the steam library to the old HDD? Did you remove the local folders from the library locations? (remove SSD as a game location in the steam library settings forcing steam to use the hdd and its library)

in steam click on Steam, go to settings, click on downloads, and at the top is the library settings, add the HDD steam library folders here. if you want no games on SSD remove any folders that are on the C: drive.

 

[The Paladin]

you need to reinstall steam, then launch reinstalls of your programs making sure you indicate the correct drive where they are located, after the download, your games settings will be restored to what it was before.

 

[Hassan83]

did you install steam under windows 10? did you update the location of the steam library to the old HDD? Did you remove the local folders from the library locations? (remove SSD as a game location in the steam library settings forcing steam to use the hdd and its library)

in steam click on Steam, go to settings, click on downloads, and at the top is the library settings, add the HDD steam library folders here. if you want no games on SSD remove any folders that are on the C: drive.

Here's what I did. In order to access Steam from my SSD, I didn't reinstall anything. I simply went to my Steamapps folder located on my HDD and created a shortcut and put it on my desktop. When I go to settings and libraries, the location is still set to my HDD. What did you mean by "did you install steam under windows 10"?

 

[Hassan83]

I figured it out. First of all, the game saves are NOT located in the Steamapps folder. Most of them are in the user's documents library. You should search up the specific directory for each game if you cannot find it. This means that if you copy the game folders from your HDD's documents to your SSD's documents, you will be able to play your games normally again. If you however don't want any more space to be taken up on your SSD, check out this guide on how to create symbolic links. You can create symbolic links in your SSD's document's folder that point to any location on your HDD where you want to save your game data except for any of its user or documents folders if you plan on uninstalling Windows from it.

 

[R_1]

did you install steam after you installed windows 10? program installers change the registry and alter system files, you need to install steam to make those changes to the windows 10 registry and system files. after the steam install the program (old steam) on the other drive will work when launched from the new drive (SSD).