I am being forced to delete Elite

Fyrd Judge

Fyrd Judge
No, it's not what you think. Last beta download reached the near limits of my hard drive space as the patch size was big. I predict the upcoming one will be huge. So it is time to delete Elite from C drive and move it to the one that has 2 terabyte of space.
Now as FD do not give any information on this subject prior a download, not even warn us of the size of the patch is due to prepare us, can someone help me and others and provide an idiots step by step procedure on what i have to do to transfer Elite to another hard drive and what files i have to copy and where to place them.


Your time and help is appreciated.
 

Shadowed

Shadowed
You can select the installation path in Steam. I did transfer my purchase to steam just for the convenience. I highly suggest you do the same if this is a big problem.

But I don't know if you can move the game manually. It is stored in User/Appdata/Local/Frontier_Developments

The other folder without the _ are your settings which don't take up much room.
 

Gedd

G
you can use a small program called steam mover to move your install without deleting and re installing i have used it in the past and its safe works well and saves time also works with any file not just steam
 

Badben

Badben
if you want need help moving your game to steam, do this. go to https://www.frontierstore.net and sign in. Under the "my account" drop down menu, go to "my orders". Then in the left hand menu, select "partner keys", there should be a steam key. In steam go to "games" at the top of the window and there "activate a product on steam" put the code in there. THEN, if you want to change where your games install on steam, use these instructions https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7418-YUBN-8129
 

CMDR James Bof

C
You need to move it and create a symbolic junction link from the original location to the new location:

1. From Explorer enter %LocalAppData%
2. Move the Frontier_Developments to your other drive
3. Open Command Prompt (Start Menu\Windows System\Command Prompt on Windows 10)
4. Enter the following
mklink /j "%LocalAppData%\Frontier_Developments" "<full path to new location>"

eg. If you're moving it to "D:\Games" you'd enter

mklink /j "%LocalAppData%\Frontier_Developments" "D:\Games\Frontier_Developments"
 

Alec Turner

Alec Turner
I can tell you one fairly foolproof method for moving ANY software installation you want from one disk to another and that's to use the DOS mklink command.

The following assumes that C: is the drive where your ED is currently installed and D: is the drive you want to move it to.

1) Find the folder where the software is installed and copy the whole lot to a similar location on your other disk. For Elite Dangerous this might be something like "C:\Program Files (x86)\Frontier" which you'd want to copy in its entirety to "D:\Program Files (x86)".

2) Now rename the original folder to something like "Frontier.bak" to move it aside (ultimately we want to remove it entirely to free up the space but initially just rename it so we can test that this is all going to work).

3) Run a Windows Command Prompt as administrator (basically find the shortcut for Command Prompt, either in your start menu or on your desktop, right-click it and pick "Run as administrator").

4) Use the 'CD' command to change into the directory where the software was originally installed (e.g. cd "\Program Files (x86)").

5) Now here comes the magic ... use the 'mklink' command to create a directory link from the current location to where the software has now been moved to, for example:

C:\Program Files (x86)> mklink /D "Frontier" "D:\Program Files (x86)\Frontier"

6) As far as ED is concerned, your software is still installed on the C: drive and everything should continue to work exactly as before. Give this a thorough testing. Once you're happy that it's worked you can simply remove the entirety of "Frontier.bak" to free up the space on the C: drive.

Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried this with Elite Dangerous but I have done it with numerous other bits of software. The only gotcha I'm aware of is that if anything (e.g. an uninstalll) ever decides to remove the software from the original install directory then it may well simply remove the link you've created, leaving everything else still over on the D: drive where you copied it. Not disastrous as you can simply tidy this up yourself but worth keeping in mind.

o7


Edit: ninja'd by James ... James, any idea of the virtues of mklink /J over mklink /D ?
 
Last edited:

Fyrd Judge

Fyrd Judge
Shadowed said:
You can select the installation path in Steam. I did transfer my purchase to steam just for the convenience. I highly suggest you do the same if this is a big problem.

But I don't know if you can move the game manually. It is stored in User/Appdata/Local/Frontier_Developments

The other folder without the _ are your settings which don't take up much room.
Click to expand...

I don't use steam, Steam was not hosting Elite when i started though i may have to do what you advise

Alec Turner said:
I can tell you one fairly foolproof method for moving ANY software installation you want from one disk to another and that's to use the DOS mklink command.

The following assumes that C: is the drive where your ED is currently installed and D: is the drive you want to move it to.

1) Find the folder where the software is installed and copy the whole lot to a similar location on your other disk. For Elite Dangerous this might be something like "C:\Program Files (x86)\Frontier" which you'd want to copy in its entirety to "D:\Program Files (x86)".

2) Now rename the original folder to something like "Frontier.bak" to move it aside (ultimately we want to remove it entirely to free up the space but initially just rename it so we can test that this is all going to work).

3) Run a Windows Command Prompt as administrator (basically find the shortcut for Command Prompt, either in your start menu or on your desktop, right-click it and pick "Run as administrator").

4) Use the 'CD' command to change into the directory where the software was originally installed (e.g. cd "\Program Files (x86)").

5) Now here comes the magic ... use the 'mklink' command to create a directory link from the current location to where the software has now been moved to, for example:

C:\Program Files (x86)> mklink /D "Frontier" "D:\Program Files (x86)\Frontier"

6) As far as ED is concerned, your software is still installed on the C: drive and everything should continue to work exactly as before. Give this a thorough testing. Once you're happy that it's worked you can simply remove the entirety of "Frontier.bak" to free up the space on the C: drive.

Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried this with Elite Dangerous but I have done it with numerous other bits of software. The only gotcha I'm aware of is that if anything (e.g. an uninstalll) ever decides to remove the software from the original install directory then it may well simply remove the link you've created, leaving everything else still over on the D: drive where you copied it. Not disastrous as you can simply tidy this up yourself but worth keeping in mind.

o7


Edit: ninja'd by James ... James, any idea of the virtues of mklink /J over mklink /D ?
Click to expand...

Thank you. Rep on way.
 
Last edited:

Fyrd Judge

Fyrd Judge
Badben said:
if you want need help moving your game to steam, do this. go to https://www.frontierstore.net and sign in. Under the "my account" drop down menu, go to "my orders". Then in the left hand menu, select "partner keys", there should be a steam key. In steam go to "games" at the top of the window and there "activate a product on steam" put the code in there. THEN, if you want to change where your games install on steam, use these instructions https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7418-YUBN-8129
Click to expand...

Thank you and rep went to all that posted thanks Commanders.
 
Last edited:

IndigoWyrd

IndigoWyrd
Love to symbolic links.. they're amazing.
You can also do this to keep temporary files from accumulating on solid state drives, creating excessive wear.
 

GunnerBill

GunnerBill
Can I haz.... oh wait.

Sry!

-------------------


Good luck with your disk drive maneuvers, I had the same issue on my old laptop when the latest Doom needed a 12 gig update :(
 
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