Robots Will Be Our Superiors

The game downloading service Steam offers a convenient product.  Instead of buying physical media at a store (which can be lost, damaged, and creates more waste), Steam allows you to download games directly to your hard drive while offering a robust user community, cloud saving, and many other handy services.

The drawback is that writing all of the game files to the primary hard disk can take up gobs of space in a hurry.  This problem can easily be alleviated if the user has a separate hard drive installed.  My own setup consists of a smaller hard drive for my operating system and application files and a much larger hard drive for media and projects.  With Steam games taking up more and more space on my OS drive, I decided to move them to a new location on my larger drive.  A simple copy and paste won’t do the trick, however.

This tutorial explains how to create a link between the main hard drive with Windows 7 installed on it to the larger hard drive with more space.  It will involve deleting folders and using the command prompt, so if you’re not comfortable with either I would recommend exploring other options.  That said, the process is fairly straightforward and easy to do.  (The good news is that Steam allows unlimited downloads of purchased content.  If you truly manage to bugger things, simply reinstall the Steam client and re-download all your games.)

1. Copy the “Steam” folder from your primary hard drive (located in either “C:\Program Files (x86)” or just “C:\Program Files”) and paste it to your new hard drive.  I put it in the root directory of the new hard drive.
2. Delete the “Steam” directory on your original hard drive.
3. From the Windows Start Menu, go to Accessories and right click on Command Prompt.  Select “Run as Administrator”.
4. Enter the following command, inserting the original and destination directories to fit your computer.  The quote marks are necessary:

   mklink /J "old directory" "new directory"

For example, on my computer I used the following command:

mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam" "E:\Steam"

The mklink command creates a symbolic link between one directory and another.  Whenever Windows goes to look for the original directory it will be redirected to the new directory on your second hard drive.  You will know the command is successful when you see what looks like a shortcut in the original Program Files directory.  If you ever want to remove this link, simply delete this shortcut.

The good news is that because Windows is simply redirecting itself, your original shortcuts will all still be functional.  Steam and all the games it monitors will continue to function as normal.  If you download a new game in the future, the symbolic link will send the new games to their proper destination.