Getting back games when reinstall.

[MsTrMind]

Hey all!

My setup (the parts that count)

- El Cheapo SSD

- 1.5TB HDD

Situation:

This is a shared pc, used by me, my parents and my brother. I do some lightweight gaming, my parents just check mail and browse a little and my brother just plays facebook games and checks youtube video's on this machine.

I have on the SSD my Operating System installed (windows 8 Pro x64) and my parents' applications (MS Office, Chrome, ...), basically the applications they want to start fast.

On the HDD I have my media (movies, series, music, ...) and my games installed.

Now I have the annoying habbit of breaking my Windows installation (A LOT! happened 3 times since Win8 was released).

I don't care about reinstalling Windows nor the drivers. I just hate to reinstall every game from a dvd.

I do lightweight gaming, by that I mean I don't really care about graphics quality, loading times, great audio, ... But I do play a lot of games, Battlefield, Call of Duty, Need for Speed, ... About 10 games I have to reintall every time...

Is there any way to recover my games from my previous Windows installation?

[GoodBytes]

Usually you don't need to re-install your games in order them to work. If games requires DRM like GFWL, or Steam, or Ubisoft UPlay or Origin, you need to re-install those, but beside that, the game should just run, if you double click on there executable. You might need to enter the product key that came with the box and install the latest DirectX runtime libraries (http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=35) if they start with some error, but most of them or all of them should just work.

The only program that you need to re-install for proper functioning is Office and web browser as they have integrated features with the OS, and file associations link to it, so you want those done right.

Also, did you know you can re-install Windows 8 (new feature!) from a made image done within Windows

Check the feature out, and how to set it up:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/matt-harrington/archive/2012/04/01/create-a-windows-8-refresh-image-with-recimg-exe.aspx

[L.E.D]

If you are using Steam then this will help you, and maybe for Origin I am not sure though, but lets continue, If you keep the games on a different harddrive or you can copy the games files from your SSD to the HDD that'd be great,

If the games are on a different hard drive,

1) Install Steam as you normally would.

2) Move your game files to the Common folder, (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common)

3) Open up Steam > Login

4) Choose the game you want to install, run it as you would if you were downloading the game, You should then see the loading bar, if you watch the information text above it you will see that it has found existing game files and it will verify those,

5) It is a good idea to verify the game files once again, to do that Right Click on the game in your Steam Library > Properties > Local Files (TAB) > Verify Integrity of Game Cache

6) Enjoy the game !

Hope it helped

Nathan