Re Formatting, Copying & Moving Files ?

[Para]

ok lads its Re format time its been two years since it was done last and its seriously needing done again !

now current set up is this,

a 150gb primary boot drive with nothing on it but XP and its various drivers, (the one to be re formatted obviously)
a 150 gb HDD with nothing on it but Steam, steam games and its various files on it.
a 150 gb HDD with all my other games installed on it.
a 500 gb HDD with Movies & Music on it.
a 500 gb HDD with all my Business documents and information on it.

now i have backed up all of the above drives on two 500Gb external USB HDD's.

now my question is this ? can i re format my boot drive and re install XP and then plug back in all my other drives with no issues ? or do i have to re format all the other drives too and then transfer all my data back from the External drives ?

and also i am just about finished building a test rig made from various parts i have strewn accross the house,
my question about this is,
since i have Steam and all its games and various files saved to its own HDD, is it possible to transfer all the Steam files from my main PC (above) to the test rig ?
or do i have to install Steam seperatly and then spend the next 5000 years re-downloading all the games and updates from Steam on my utterly shit connection ??

I await your infinite wisdom.................... cheers........

[groinshot]

Generally, what happens is you reformat the XP drive, and reinstall windows onto that. nothing else will be touched. But your programs won't work (there'll be no reg entries for them) so you're nearly as well off just to clear the drives with the programs, steam etc off them, and just unplug your movies, music, pics owrk files, excel, word etc stuff. just unplug the drives, format windows and install, and when its done just plug in the other drives again. all your data will be saved, except programs wont work.

[smithster]

lol, para ya nutter,

you only need to format the system drive (the one with windows on it) but its good that you've backed up all ya data now anyway!

have you backed up your steam games etc, what about the saved game files from other games, i dont know if you pointed the games to different install directories so just checking.

most things you install still have files installed on the system drive somewhere, be it registry files, .dll's etc etc etc so after you have reformatted you will still need to reinstall some stuff. long as your game files are all saved nicely you should just be able to reinstall steam and then restore the games. this goes for most of the other stuff, ....well stuff u need to install in the first place. long as the info u want is backed up then the most you will have to do is reinstall the software.

when u installed all ya stuff i take it you said install to this folder, well.. someting like this or whatever E:\software\games\"game name"

when u reinstall to that folder it will most likely say "this and that already exist do you want to overwrite it blah blah" just make sure ur saved game files or software customisation files are saved somewhre else before you go overwritting stuff then copy them back over when ya done.

shope that helps, bit of a ramble but im at work typing quick all over the place

[^Stueh]

With steam.

Re-install the app via the website. Open it -> log in -> close it. Overwrite the steam apps folder with your stuff. And your good to go once you started steam up again that is

gl hf