Hi tek forum. I have recetnly upgraded to Windows 8.1 and I had the windows.old folder with all my Origin and steam games and program files etc. When I was tranfering them from the .old to the new program files, something happened and they did not transfer properly (so I need to re-download everything) and I was wondering I could have my main HDD for my OS only and then a second HDD for the program files etc, so if I was wanting a fresh install of Windows I would not have to fiddle about with the .old folder anymore. If this is possible how would I go about doing this?
Any help appreacited.
Yes, you totally can!!! I have my rig set up this way. My 240GB SSD has the OS and main programs installed including steam, origin, etc. And my music movies and games are all on a old 640GB HDD and 2TB HDD.
With steam, you can just reinstall the client and in the settings pick the hard drive and folder where your games are, once it recognizes that you have steam games in that folder, you should be able to play them again as normal. However, some games save to the My Documents folder so some of your saves may not have transferred. Origin on the other hand, has no such feature, you have to re-download everything unfortunately :/
As for the setup, it depends. If you have only one hard drive, you can make a partition. If you have 2 hard drives, you can install the OS in one and use the other for the rest.
I suggest Getting a 120GB or 240-250GB SSD for a speedy system. If you can't afford that, just make an OS partition on one of your hard drives. Anything from 150GB to 250 should be enough. If you're newer to this, depending on the program or OS you're using the partitions are measure in MB, so 250,000MB=250GB.
If you're going to install from scratch, you have the option to make a partition when first installing Windows 8, if you don't want to start from scratch, I highly suggest that you do unless you know what you're doing, you can use boot programs like G-Parted live. I'm sure there are tutorial videos on youtube explaining how to do both methods. Good luck :)
Thank you so much for the help. Thats great!