So if you want to move all your PC
games to a brand new hard drive, but you are dreading having to spend hours
downloading your games all over again, well I'm here to tell you that you don't have to! Because in this series of videos I'm
going to go through the step-by-step guide that you need to follow so
that you can get all your games onto your new hard drive without
having to download them all again! So a few minutes of your time spent here
is going to save you hours afterwards. Now each video in this series is going
to be focusing on a different game store, and this week it's the turn of EA Games.
Plus I'm going to show you how to set up a new hard drive so that it's ready
for you to install those games too. Welcome to My Tech Gear, let's get into it! So before you can start downloading and
saving anything to a new hard drive, the first thing that you need to do is set it up. Now for ease of use I would recommend an
external hard drive for this as you only need to plug it into a USB port instead of
opening up your PC case. However, whether you use an external or an internal drive, the steps
for formatting and setting it up are the same. First things first. Let's open
up the Disk Management tool. Now in order to do that… Press the Windows key to bring
up the windows home menu. Type in ‘disk’ and then there is a ‘create
and format hard disk partition’ option. Click on that. When you open up that Disk Management
tool you are going to see your default drive in this list. Now for most people
it's going to be ‘D’ or an ‘E’. For me it's the one touch drive that I've just
attached to my PC. So it's ‘E’ for me. Now you just need to format your hard
drive. So in the Disk Management tool, click on your hard drive. Right click and
then select ‘format’. By default you're pretty much going to leave it as ‘NTFS’. You
can change if you want to but for most people, ‘NTFS’. Then just click on ‘OK‘ and it will
do a quick format of that drive. I'm not going to do that because I've already done
it, but that's how you set up a new drive. It's now all ready once that format's
finished for you to install new games too! Now in order to switch EA over to use your
new hard drive we need to do three things. We need to change the default installation
folder in the EA app to a new drive. We need to copy all the games from
your current drive to the new one. And then finally we need to tell the EA app to use the new drive for all those
games that you just moved. So to change the default installation
folder to the new drive, open up the EA app and click in the top left hand
corner and click on ‘settings’. Now under the download tab here you'll see
where the default install location is. Now I've actually already moved it to the new
folder but for you you will probably see it as ‘C:\program files\EA games’ or something like that. So we are going to change this, but remember this
folder location before you change it as you will need it later as you're going to need to copy
the games from that folder to your new drive. So click on ‘edit’ and then select whatever
folder you want for your new drive. Again, I like to have a folder for every App
Store so I've got an E: one touch games EA folder. So from now on all future games
are going to be installed to that directory. Now we need to copy the games you already
have installed over to that new drive. So simply open up two Explorer windows.
So again, ‘windows + E’ key for quickly opening up two windows. Go
to your original folder where those games were in the first place. Now
for me that's ‘D:\games\EA Games’. Then we're going to go to the new folder
in the new drive. That's ‘E:\games\EA’. So the EA folder is empty over there. Then
simply just drag your game folders over to the new drive and it's going to copy all
those games over onto your new drive. Now the big advantage of copying rather than cut
and pasting is it means if something goes wrong in that file transfer you haven't lost the original
folder so you can then go and try it again. Once that folder is copied across we now need to
get the EA app to pick up the new folder location. Now the EA app is a bit of a pain in the
backside in regards to this. What we need to do, because EA app still thinks it's in that old
location, we need to change the directory inside the registry of the machine.
Now this isn't as scary as it sounds! So first up we want to kill the EA apps. We're
just going to close that and it will say it's running in the background. We need to kill
those background services as well. So you want to open up the task manager. There's
several ways of doing that. I like to just press the ‘Windows’ key and the ‘X’ key and
then select ‘task manager’ from the pop-up. Now in this list of processes that are here you
will find ‘EA’. So you want to kill the app. Right click and select ‘end task’. The background
service is probably still running. There we go. ‘EA background service’. So you want to
right click on that and ‘end task’ as well. Now what we need to do, because the EA app is
currently still pointing at the old folder, we need to go into the registry
and change it to the new location. Hit the Windows key and type in ‘regedit’ and
that will start your Windows registry. Now go to your ‘local machine’ and ‘software’. Now
under here there will either be an ‘EA games’ folder or sometimes there is a folder for the
developer that made the game. So in the case of Apex for instance, Respawn Entertainment make
Apex, so the registry key that we need is under there rather than ‘EA Games’. It's not always
obvious. There's not one rule so you do have to do a little bit of looking around in here. So for
me I know it's ‘Respawn’ and Apex is under there. If you had something like Battlefield installed
there would be an ‘EA games’ folder and there would be ‘Battlefield’ under there. So under
Apex you can see the install directory and it's currently pointing at ‘D’ which is the old folder.
So we're going to open this up. Souble click and it opens it up here. Now I want to change this
to my new folder which is ‘E:\games\EA\Apex’. So if I just double click on ‘apex’. I've
now got the folder that I want to change it to. So if I copy that, so that's ‘Ctrl-C’ and
then go over to the registry. Highlight all of that. Select delete. Copy Paste (‘Ctrl-V’) and
that's my ‘E:\games\EA\Apex’ and click on ‘OK’. If I now restart the EA app again right. So
now if I click into my library you can see Apex is there. It says that it's playable. If
you click on the top right buttons there. Those little dots. Click on ‘view properties’.
You'll see it's under ‘E:\games\EA\Apex’. So it's picked up that registry key change
and it is now pointing at the new folder. So it is a little bit convoluted and
it's a little bit more long-winded than some of the other game stores
for moving games around but at least you can do it. I just don't know why EA
don't make it easier so that it's just… Why can't you just do it inside the app?! Anyway, those are the steps that
you need to follow. You do have to make sure that you kill that background
service before you change the registry key otherwise your registry key changes
aren't going to be picked up by this app. Once you've confirmed everything is working
go back to your original directory and go and delete the original folder because
you're not going to need that anymore. That's EA all done! If you want to find out how to move games
in more game stores or find out which hard drive is best for gaming for you then
be sure to check out the links up here. I will put links actually to some hard drive
options in the description down below for you. Thanks for watching, if you have enjoyed the
video please don't forget to like and share it. Consider subscribing if you're not. And as always… I'll see you in the next one!
