It's this old chestnut that I know appears here from time to time, and I just wondered if anything had changed of late. I bought a 1TB External Hard Drive for keeping all my BFG games on and thereby not "crowding up" my laptop hard drive. I have downloaded ALL my games onto it in the past month (masses of them). Now there is a problem with the EHD and it has to go back to the shop. As I understand it, there is NO way I can now copy these games from the EHD to anywhere else is there, so that I can still play them? As I see it, I will have to download them all again because they have already been downloaded and installed onto this hard drive. The shop said they can do it, but they have NO idea about the "laws" governing the BFG Games Manager and how it operates. I have to take this EHD back in on Monday, so I need to do something this weekend. Its a shame this has happened right now because it holds ALL my recent purchases, and they took me an awful lot of time to download. Cheers for any help.

Rozanne

Oh, good, Rosaboobie. I'm so glad you're asking here because I just don't know for sure.

Well,me neither, Drac, and I am just trying to avoid all this massive downloading again.......

It's possible that the games will work after they're transferred to another external hard drive. I think it's your main computer that is holding the activation information and not the external hard drive.

Oh ok, Jenny, thanks for that info. So I have to copy these games onto my laptop hard drive, and then copy them back to my other EHD??

Do you have another EHD?
I don't know the size of your laptop drive, but unless your laptop has a really large hard drive, there's the chance the games won't all fit.

I thought the EHD your games are on wasn't working. But if it's working well enough to use, and you have another EHD that's large enough, you can copy directly from one to the other.

Yes, the new EHD is working, Jenny, it's just that I bought it from the shop as a 1TB and when I got it home it turned out to only be 500GB. So it needs to be returned to the shop. And I also have an old EHD which is 1TB. I also have 221GB free on my laptop hard drive.


Sorry for being dense, Jenny, but how do I copy from one EHD to the other EHD? The problem is that I only have one adaptor for the 2 EHDs, so I am guessing this wont work for me, as I cant run the 2 EHDs at the same time?

If you only have one adapter, and both EHD's need an adapter, then that would be a problem. All the EHD's I have either came with an adapter or were able to draw all the power they needed through the USB port. I don't suppose your shop sells adapters.

Didn't the shop say they'd move your data to a new 1T hard drive?

Maybe you should just keep that one and make them give you a credit/refund or something. That sounds a whole lot easier.

They cant give me a refund, oldbroad - they have to return the EHD to Seagate unfortunately.

I agree with Jenny100 and that the Computer Shop should be able to transfer your Info from one EHD to another and as Jenny100 mentionned, double check the remaining space you have left on your Laptop Hard drive and see if you can copy all your games there as a Safe Keeping, if you do not have enough free space for All your games, Transfer the games you most likely want to play in the near future and then download the rest a bit at a time.

Rosaboobie, I'm also trying to download all my BigFish games for storage.

How did you do this? I've tried and it looks like it only installs a setup icon which connects to the website to install and activate.

It looks like you've been able to actually download the game without installing. What was your method? Did you need to install everything before you could store it?

Confused,

Sharon

What type of connection is used to connect either EHD to your laptop?

If it's USB, are there more than one USB ports on your laptop? If there are, can't the second EHD be connected to your laptop and it would then be given a different name thereby allowing you to move files from one EHD to the other?

Big Fish doesn't let you do that. You have to either install the game directly to your external hard drive, or install it to your regular hard drive and then copy the game folder to your external hard drive.

Thanks Jenny! So I download and install all my Big Fish Games to my C:Windows\Programs\anygame and then just copy the anygame files to my EHD. Then I can delete the "game" from my Program files and just copy the game file back from my EHD when I'm ready to play?

What about the numbered files initially downloaded from BigFish used to open Game Manager and download/install the games. Can they be safely deleted?

Can I delete the game names from my Startup\AllPrograms Directory? And then just create a shortcut desktop icon when I'm ready for a particular game?

I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions on this and other matters. I rely on Gameboomers for their good advice and knowledge.

Thanks, Sharon

Yes.


You can save them in case you need to reinstall from Big Fish for any reason. But Big Fish keeps them on file for you anyway, so it's not really necessary.


Yes you can do that.

That's great, Jenny. Thank you.

You're welcome.
Good luck.