I can't remove my steam drive

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1

Hey guys,

I have a steam drive, all it has on it is origin and steam. But not just the games, I mean it is the install location of those programs and the games, but that's all that's on there.

I have now bought a new bigger drive to replace this drive. I have copied over everything to the new drive and I was hoping to be able to remove the old one and swap the drive letters round in windows and for everything to work. At worse I thought I may have to reinstall steam and rebuild my library.

However I can't take out my old steam drive, when I do I get a message saying I need to insert boot media. wtf?

Somehow the steam drive, that only has steam and origin on it, has become some essential part of my OS.

I rand diskpart.exe trying to delete the volume and I get this message "Virtual disk service error: delete is not allowed on the current boot, system, pagefile, crashdump or hibernation volume."

well to my knowledge my steam drive should be none of those things.

Does anyone have any solutions? Ideally ones that don't involve me downloading 120 GB worth of games.

My current idea is to use a disk copy utility to duplicate the old drive onto the new one.

Thanks

z

2

Did you have the second drive installed when you installed windows? If so, windows could have installed your boot partitions on that second drive, and installed windows on the first one. 

3

Or this:

  • Go to the installs for steam and origin.
  • Find the games install location and name it something else so it does not get deleted or copy the folder out of the steam folder to root.
  • Uninstall steam.
  • Copy all the games that you moved to the new drive.
  • Re install steam and then move the games folder back to where they should be in the new steam install and on login.

All your games should be there. Might be missing a few that install in weird places but this will get 95% of them.

4

Yes, but if his boot partition is still on that drive, when he removes it, it wont boot.

5

Oh I see. I thought he just wanted to.move steam but it was not letting him delete it. Yeah if you are taking the drive out completely that could be a problem.

Can you get to it in Linux or something similar, repartition the first drive and move the boot over there?

6

Yeah it looks like what has happened is when you installed windows it installed the boot manager to your steam disk instead of your windows disk. This is because it will always install to the first hard drive in your boot order that you set in the BIOS.

You should be able to fix it by running startup repair from the installation disc (you may have to run it multiple times) and this will install a new boot manager. Make sure you unplug all of the disks except the windows disk in order to prevent it from doing the same thing.

7

Alternatively if you don't care which disk your boot manager is on you can just use something like clonezilla to clone the old disk to the new disk. Make sure the new disk is set at the first hard drive in the boot order and everything should work the same as it did before.