Games on second drive

Jakstaar2007

Jakstaar2007

Jakstaar2007

Associate
Joined
17 Apr 2009
Posts
1,789
Location
East Northants
Today i installed Windows 7 x64 on a spare hard drive and connected it to the SATA 0 slot, and moved my older drive with Vista 32 on, to SATA 1.
The drive in SATA 1 has all of my files and games installed on and i was under the impression that i could boot up Windows 7 x64 from the drive in SATA 1, navigate to the folder where the game i want to play is (f:\program files\) (f: is the name drive letter for the vista drive in SATA 1) and run it. However, i get errors such as Program installed incorrectly, program not installed and so on. However, when i navigate to the same area, and load up spotify, it runs fine.
Do i just need to reinstall because i am not using a x64 OS or is there another reason?

Thanks
Jack
 
Well I think it has to do with not being installed on the current running OS. You most certainly could re-install the game to the same folder it was before even and it should work. But if you ever boot your old disk as OS again same thing would happen. I'm pretty sure games/apps must be installed on the os that is running. Which hdd makes no difference.
 
Hmmm I have my OS installed on a sata drive with my games installed on a completely different sata drive and everything works perfectly :)
 
Well everything is fine when i boot back into Vista and try to run the games, it justs tells me to reinstall them when i run from Windows 7 (but my videos and spotify run fine)
 
Jakstaar2007 said:
Argh, so does that mean all of you that dual boot install the games twice?:confused:
Click to expand...

You know I take that back. I can play games/apps that are installed on my storage drive that used to be my os drive and still has an os on it. They both have the exact same OS though. I imagine your problem is from your 32 to 64 bit os difference. You probably will have to install everything twice for dual boot.
 
Generally, it works with some games/programs, but not others. So it could be x64 difference, or just be your choice of games. As for making it work with both - how about sharing the game data folders between the OSs but having the actual game components installed seperately?
 
That I'm not sure about. Some games store the game data in My Documents/Games. Other than that, the way I'd probably do it, depending on whether I ever played a game on one OS then straight away in the other OS, I'd have a script integrate/update the two game folders with the most recent files automatically at a certain time each day. Or you could do it so it synchronises them before shutting down, whenever you shut down. Or on logon.
I don't know how well it'd work in practise.
 
The main problem is registry settings. Some games (Farcry is the only one I have) have x64 native binaries, but you have to install them extra. Some games have DRM (Spore, RA3, etc) and having it installed on two OS's will count as two installs - even if they're installed to the same folder.

The great thing about Windows Vista / 7 is that it allows you to make soft links (symlinks in Linux), so you could simply link (I believe you use the junction utility to do this) your Windows 7 save folder to your Windows Vista save folder. Unfortunately most games have the saves in different locations (some save them in the install folder, those won't need a link) so you'll have to do this for most new games you install.
 
Have downloaded the juction utility. Should i run it on my vista (where all of the games are set up) or Windows 7 (where i want to be able to run my games from and load and save my files that were saved from vista)?

Cheers
Jack
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom