Moving Steam from XP32 to Vista 64

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Monkey God

Mangina Full of Sand
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May 7, 2007
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So after a less than pleasant experience with Vista when it first came out, now that SP1 is out and I have 8GB its time to play with Vista 64 again. I have dual boot for now, and my steam installation is on a separate/shared drive apart from the OS drive. It was obviously installed under XP32.

I am wondering how to migrate my Massive Steam (45GB+) installation to Vista 64.
Before, I didn't do anything, just ran Steam from where it was. I think I had to recreate some blob files, but otherwise it worked. I did have some network lag and FPS issues, but I dont know what caused them. It could have been Steam, GPU drivers, or generic Vista problems who knows.

This time, Id like to make sure I have a clean fresh install, but re-downloading 45GB of stuff is not an OK solution. Ive done some Googling and some people have tried just re-installing Steam to a new folder, than copying over the game .gcf files. Some people used the backup option.

Both options have various levels of success and failure from what I've seen. Anyone done this before? Whats your experience?

Ive got plenty of space, so I am ok with two complete installs of Steam if need be.
Reinstall steam on Vista in a new location, and copy over the gcf files after install, and then restart? Thats what I am leaning to for now but any input would be appreciated.
 
Just a thought, but you say redownloading 45 gigs is not an option. That is 12.5 hours on a 1MB/s connection. I know I suddenly relalized the other day how little 45 gigs really is these days.

Outside of that, I havn't tried moving a steam folder. Sorry :(
 
Reality is its not that fast, however it might seem to be that fast in imagination land. :)
 
Here's what I do:

Rename your existing steam folder to "Steam2"
Install steam fresh from http://storefront.steampowered.com/download/SteamInstall.msi
Launch the new steam and let it update itself
After it's updated, close it down.
Once steam.exe is no longer running, rename the new steam folder to "Steam3"
Then, rename the old steam folder, "Steam2", to "Steam"
Run steam with the shortcuts that the "new" Steam installed
Once it is working, delete the "Steam3" folder

It always works for me, and I've done it dozens of times.
 
thats interesting...so basically you're just allowing it to update the registry and install dll's and such, but in all other ways, you are using the old install base?

no issues going from 32bit to 64bit?
 
Monkey God said:
Reality is its not that fast, however it might seem to be that fast in imagination land. :)
Click to expand...

Suckage. I know my actual speed down is around 1.1mb/s. Which has made buying stuff on steam much more favorable.
 
generally if its a single big app, its over night...but I have ALOT of stuff on steam.
 
Just install STEAM and copy the SteamApps folder over.....
 
I would do a backup in Steam to hard drive, reinstall Steam from scratch on new OS, restore from backup.
 
i just copied over my entire steam folder, i then went in an deleted all the files EXCEPT the folder which contains all the games

installed steam into that folder and bam, done, did some updating and worked fine.
 
Since I don't know the backend of Steam that well, I wouldn't know if there was anything to worry about going from a 32-bit environment to a 64-bit. Although Steam very well could just run as a 32-bit program on the 64-bit OS.
 
Ludic said:
Since I don't know the backend of Steam that well, I wouldn't know if there was anything to worry about going from a 32-bit environment to a 64-bit. Although Steam very well could just run as a 32-bit program on the 64-bit OS.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't think so either, but im trying to make sure I avoid problems.
I dont want to be one of those "idiots who doesn't love the Vista ZOMG" because my Steam games have terrible pings and 10-20% less FPS like they did last time I tried Vista 64.
 
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