Reinstall apps that were installed on secondary drive

[Colonel_Panic]

This afternoon I discovered that my OCZ SSD is crap. My workstation BSODed, then the drive didn't show up in the BIOS. This is the second OCZ SSD to do this that I'm familiar with (my friend's drive went out a few weeks ago). I hate that a consumer product can be that unreliable, but since at this point I can't do much about it, I'm trying now to get my computer back to its former self.

I had most of my large applications installed on a separate "spinny disk" but I'm wondering now if there's a way to connect the Windows installation with those folders again. Steam, for example, is installed on the separate drive, so I'm hoping that once I install Steam to that same location again, it will detect the existing downloads. How about other applications? Is my only option to install over again?

 

[bigdogchris]

It depends on the application. Some will run without being installed to the OS, some won't. You can only tell by navigating to the drive and trying to run them.

For Steam, I'd rename the old folder (just put a 1 after it or something). Then reinstall Steam to the hard drive. Once it's reinstalled, rename the old one and take the 1 out. It will prompt you to overwrite then just OK. I think steam might run portably anyways, so you might just be able to drop a new shortcut on your desktop. It just won't show up in add/remove programs that way though.

 

[devil22]

For steam, that's not necessary, you can just run steam.exe in the steam folder and it will prompt to install the service and fix up everything, I've done it more than once. Most games in steam will do likewise when you run them, one exception I ran into is Fallout 3, delete and reinstall that bad boy or you will have to hose your entire steam folder to get it working, found that out the hard way (ended up downloading it multiple times before figuring out to just start over with steam.)

 

[Colonel_Panic]

Thanks for the input, guys. I bought a new Intel 510 SSD and was able to clone the drive back using a Ubuntu Live disk. I don't trust the OCZ anymore, so I'm going to try to RMA and sell it or something. Not sure why it stopped reading originally, but obviously there must be a few gremlins running around inside the drive.