adamisageek.com|blog

Sooooo, my computer is still down, but I finally managed to get the necessary files off of it even though it freezes a lot when running Windows. I did so by using an external SATA hard drive enclosure and my roomate’s laptop to access the hard drive without booting it into an operating system. Was going to use some sort of Linux LiveCD or put DOS on a flash drive and boot into that, but the enclosure route was pretty much painless and it let me do parts of the copying graphically instead of all in a DOS environment using the XCOPY command.

So I got some stuff off of the old Windows installation I wanted to keep like my “\counter strike source\” and “\team fortress 2\” folders from my Steam folder so I should be able to save some time when I reinstall by copy and pasting into the new Steam folder.

Also I used DOS to output a txt file with all the files, folders, and subdirectories of “c:\program files\” so I know all the programs I had installed and I can reinstall them one by one. This is done by executing this command:

dir “e:\program files” /s > “c:\adam’s program files list.txt”

(where “e:\program files” is the target directory and “c:\adam’s program files list.txt” is the destination of the output text file, the “/s” tells the command to search subfolders too)

Well, at this point, when I get home from work today, Windows should be done with the time consuming part of installation, and should only need me to do the final registration steps like inputting my Windows serial number. Once it’s installed, I’ll be installing the system drivers like the onboard [motherboard] audio, ethernet, monitor, and graphics card (can’t wait to rip into my new 8600gs baby woot!). Once that’s all up and configured correctly, I move on to installation of some main things, more importantly, games. I’ll be installing Steam, then copying over my current CS:S and TF2 folders and then starting Steam and making sure they run ok. If they don’t, I’ll have to download and install the games from scratch via Steam. If that’s the case, I won’t need to use my old copy of my entire TF2 folder from my old Windows installation since it has no modifications other than the maps downloaded, so I’ll just copy the “\maps\” folder over for TF2. However, no matter what happens with TF2, I’ll definitely need to copy over my CS:S folders because of all the custom skins and tons of maps I have installed for that game. I spent probably a week of my spare time just getting the skins working and looking correct. The time was worth it though, if you’re into CS:S like me, I highly recommend heading over to FPSbanana and checking out some CS:S skins, maps, sounds, etc. They change the whole feel of the game, I’ll never go back to the regular skins for CS:S, and I’ll be checking out skins for TF2 eventually as well