A few days back I talked about losing the hard drive that a lot of stuff was installed on. The games were not that big of a deal, because I can legitimately download them faster than I can copy them to another drive. What ultimately ended up causing an issue however was the fact that all of my storefront game launchers were installed on that drive. This morning through some trial and error I sorted out how to restore them, and I thought I would write up a quick guide to how I fixed each of them.
Fixing Steam
This one was dead simple. I downloaded the steam client and installed it. There was a minor issue with the steam library on the drive that I installed to. Previously I had farmed out library space to all of the drives in my system, meaning that I can a “DRIVELETTER:\Games\Steam” repository on every drive where the games for steam installed. So when I went to install Steam to F, it would not let me mount two repositories on the same drive, considering Steam created its own internal repository. The fix was simple, you can move steam games freely, and I just copied them from the previous “F:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common” folder to the newly created repository.
For sake of anyone finding this at a later down, everything contained within “steamapps\common” is more or less portable. While you can move games around between your repositories from the steam client, you can also simply just copy them freely between “steamapps\common” directories on your system pending the steam client is not running. This also means that if you have large bulk storage you can back up your game at will when you just want to free up some space, and then copy it back in when you want to use it again.
Fixing Origin
This is the beginnings of my woes, because with Steam now having a bunch of EA games… they still require you to have Origin installed. No matter how many times I attempted to run the installer it would crash out telling me that it could not find “G:\Games\Origin” aka the original path. The challenge there is that google doesn’t exactly have a lot of cases of “my drive died and now I can’t install origin” examples. I did however find buried down in the stack someone talking about an uninstall failing, and I followed those directions.
The first step was to boot Windows 10 into safe mode. This would have been the correct way to do it. Another way would have been to hold down Control while booting, but that only works if your keyboard is recognized by the bios quickly during the boot. Instead I jumped through a bunch of hoops, but ultimately ended up in safe mode. You need to locate your AppData folder, and the easiest way is to type %appdata% in your search prompt. You are looking for:
- AppData\Roaming\Origin
- AppData\Local\Origin
Once you have deleted these two directories, reboot and you should be able to install Origin fresh once and for all.
Fixing Epic Games Launcher
During the above process I found a folder in AppData for Epic Games Launcher and tried deleting it, thinking maybe just maybe it would work. It did not. What I did instead however on a whim, is grab a random thumb drive and mount it to the same letter as the drive that died, aka G in this case. When I then ran the Epic Games Installer it launched happily and attempted to install the Launcher to this thumb drive. I let it finish doing what it was doing and then turned around and immediately uninstalled the launcher from Control Panel\Programs and Features.
After doing this I was finally able to install the Launcher to a directory of my choosing. This trick MIGHT have worked for Origin, but I was not to the point of desperation that I was with Epic Launcher. For now that appears that my system is back to fighting form with all of the necessarily launchers installed. If I run into any new issues along the way I will try and update this post with the directions on how I fixed them.