changing os What's the best way to downgrade from Windows 11 to 10 without loosing all of my PCs files/games?

[GenericBot1]

Hey guys so around a month and a half ago I upgraded to windows 11 and have had zero problems and actually liked it until now. Earlier this week I received the HP Reverb G2 and was excited to use it until I ran into issues with steam VR. It was crashing at almost every game and the games that loaded had bad performance. This is after me changing some of the settings and runni8ng them on a PC that has an RTX 3070 FE and a 5600x as well as a NVMe SSD and ample cooling.  After consulting the HP Reverb G2 subreddit, it sounds like Steam VR isn't compatible with Windows 11 at the moment and my best course of action is to try to go back to Windows 10. I was wondering what the best and easiest way of doing this is without loosing all of my files. I've never done something like this before and I'm terrified that I might loose some of my game progress, recordings, mods, or ending up having to reinstall every game I have on my P.C right now (a lot) all over again. I'd really appreciate any advice or guidance for this cause I really don't want to screw this up and mess up my P.C.  

[Kilrah]

There basically isn't an option, you have to format and reinstall the OS.

 

SteamVR works just fine on W11 for me though. 

[GenericBot1]

20 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

There basically isn't an option, you have to format and reinstall the OS.

 

SteamVR works just fine on W11 for me though. 

What headset do you use. i think its mainly a Windows Mixed Reality thing because many other G2 users seem to be reporting the same thing

[Kilrah]

Quest 2. Might be MR indeed.

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, GenericBot1 said:

something like this before and I'm terrified that I might loose some of my game progress, recordings, mods, or ending up having to reinstall every game I have on my P.C

So this might sound cumbersome,  and it is,  but its still better than redoing everything from scratch...

 

 

You need a hard drive with enough capacity,  then copy everything you want to keep onto that. Games, music, videos,  saves, etc (but no windows stuff, obviously)

 

Then install win 10 and copy everything back.

At least for games (you may need to reinstall mods, depends on how you installed them, in fact I'd suggest to remove mods before doing this, especially if you used any modmanagers) you can just go to "verify files" in steam  - but make sure they're actually in the right folder ("steamapps")  then steam should find the games so you don't need to reinstall. 

 

 

Many other apps / programs will just work after moving them back or even leaving them on the drive you copied them to, but not all apps will work,  usually especially Microsoft store apps, but you'll just have to to find out which ones.

 

Edited November 22, 2021 by Mark Kaine