diary : entry

Steam-ing pile of

4th October 2005 at 12:07
Ok, after yesterday was efficient-catching-up-with-things-to-do day, today has been tidying day. With a lot of desk to tidy and a lot of piles of things to put away, I thought it would also be a good opportunity to tie my computer up doing something I've been meaning to do for a while - move my Half-Life 2 installation from my C drive to my D drive.

My C drive is reserved for operating system stuff (to make re-install easier), and my D drive is the one I fill with games and work and stuff. Only I wasn't paying attention to the HL2 installer the first time round, so it ended up on the C drive and I ended up running out of space.

Software these days has all kinds of crazy copy protection locking an installation in place, so the best option is clearly to uninstall HL2 from the C drive, and reinstall it on the D drive, right?

Wrong.

I have uninstalled HL2 and steam, only those directories are only partially empty, thanks to steam renaming a whole bunch of files. I reinstalled steam, but now HL2 won't install from the DVD because the files can't be found in the CABs. How stupid is that? The DVD isn't corrupt, I can copy all the files off, but can't install them locally because... no, I have no idea.

So it looks like my only option now is to download HL2 from steam to reinstall it. All 3GB of it. Despite the retail DVD sitting in the drive. Crazy or what? Advanced copy protection in action, folks.

Comments

  1. I must be the luckest person when it comes to computers. I've managed to have no problems with any of the following:
    1) Steam
    2) Windows
    3) IE (until i stopped using it)
    4) CD burning
    5) Copy protection schemes (even star force)

    I d/led Hl2 rather than buy the disc and i have a better copy, which nicely updates itself and i've no problems.

    If you can get the gcf files off the DVD then install steam and put those files in the SteamApps folder. Unless Vivendi screwed you over (they made the DVD and put their own copy protection on which has problems with steam apparently) then the files will be the same as those i have and you'll be all good.
    NoVisAnima4th October 2005 at 13:09
  2. I get round all of these things by never playing HL2.

    I get round a bunch of other problems by never using my computer. I prefer to do things which don't have advanced copy protection crap on it these days, like cooking and cleaning :)
    The Other Andrew4th October 2005 at 13:13
  3. Peter: Grr! Some people have all the luck. And I thought I'd get a DVD because it would be more reliable (haha at me) :)

    In the end I copied the CD to my hard drive again and ran the installer from there, and it worked fine. Looks like there was some kind of random corruption reading from the DVD drive.

    Now I'm waiting for the game files to decrypt. This copy protection is a bit overkill. Just let me run the game, make me log into a server if I want to play online by all means, but this is overkill. How does can offline LANs play HL2? Joke.

    Andrew: I just did a lot of cleaning! There will be a new entry about that shortly :)
    radiac4th October 2005 at 14:44
  4. I'm awaiting the day when you have to give a set of biometric samples when purchasing any software which are subsequently tested against the sample taken every time you run the thing. For small utilities or low-value software, the test would be something like a thumbprint. For bigger software it would be a test like a retina scan. For anything by MS, it would be a full body cavity search and fluids examination.

    If the cleaning becomes a popular activity, I'm sure there are clubs you could join.
    DavidH11th October 2005 at 21:54

Add a comment

Name:(required)
E-mail:(will not be made public)
Website:
Comment:
Fruit: Your fruit of the day is:


Please enter it below:

Thank you for proving you are a human, not a spammer!
 

Links