copying games to new external hardrive?

**andy71480** · February 10th, 2010, 05:51 PM

OK I do alot of PC gaming, an soon to be the proud owner of a badazz gaming PC , i bought a new WD 500gb external drive. I was hoping to bypass the endless hours of updating an patching all the games by installing them on my new computer. An was hoping to i guess copy an paste them from my laptop to my external drive, then again onto my new drive when i get my PC in about a week. Now my limited experience with flash drives an stuff leads me to think that the only thing ill be able to do is copy the config an data files successfully. An will end up having to patch an upgrade them anyhow, or am i wrong? Will my games work this way? Or do i have to install them to the drive? So basically i just want to not spend the hours an days patching Warcrack an CoD. If anyones got any advice or whatnot please drop me a line. I just want to save myself the time an disapointment if its not gonna work.

**DoubleK** · February 10th, 2010, 09:07 PM

Why not simply install the game to the external hard drive?

**andy71480** · February 10th, 2010, 10:17 PM

well for one i dont want to run the game off the external seeing as how its alot slower data transfer. an i was really just looking to i guess move whole updated programs/games into my new computer hard drive. bypassing the time it takes to new install an update the games. some of which take countless hours an maybe even days to patch. thats all , i guess im just being lazy :P

**stroyal** · February 10th, 2010, 10:49 PM

If you were just changing a drive, you could clone the whole drive to the new drive and everything would work,
AFAIK there is no way to do this with a single or group of installed programs, from one computer to another.
Edit.
If you have windows 98

just move the old drive to the new computer.
The new computer,with win 98 will just install the new drivers, and usually work.

I have heard people have done this with XP, and a repair install.
Nothing I would try.

**DoubleK** · February 10th, 2010, 11:18 PM

Most games use a patch you download. Simply save the patch.

Steam has a backup function.

World of Warcraft, just copy the folder (I would zip it 1st) and when reinstalling simply copy this folder to the new Program Files folder, Make a shortcut to the WoW Launcher, and start playing again! Pretty simple.

**EXreaction** · February 11th, 2010, 12:27 AM

You can save patches, but you can't copy programs from one install to another as most have many other files they require that are not immediately accessible (nor is there any easy way to find out what files are needed).