Overview
Sometimes, when installing Half-Life 2 or related games (Like Episode One or Lost Coast), you won’t get the option to chose which hard drive to install it to. Here is the solution.
Step 1
You need to uninstall most Source based games from your steam library.
This includes:
- Half-Life 2
- Half-Life 2: Deathmatch
- Half-Life 2: Episode One
- Half-Life 2: Episode Two
- Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
- Half-Life: Source
- Team Fortress 2
You may also need to uninstall:
- Day of Defeat: Source
- Counter-Strike: Source
- Portal
- Any other Source Engine Games
Strangely, I did not need to uninstall these games which also use the source engine, but you may need to:
- Half-Life Deathmatch: Source
- Portal 2
- Left 4 Dead
Step 2
Once those games are uninstalled, try to install Half-Life 2 and you should get the option to chose which drive to install it to. When installing subsequent games from the above list, you won’t get this option, but your original choice when installing Half-Life 2 is respected (They all get installed to the same folder).
Because of this though, you cannot install any of the above games to different drives.
Time-Saving Tip
If you don’t want to re-download all the games you need to uninstall above, try this method:
1. Locate the files of the game you are about to uninstall. Right click on the game in your steam library and choose “Properties” from the context menu. Go to the “Local Files” tab. Click the button titled “Browse Local Files…”. This will open the directory containing the files for the game.
2. You need to copy this whole directory (So go back one folder, then “cut” the whole folder).
3. Paste the folder into the new location where you want the game to be installed. This is going to be one of your other Steam Library folders, in the “steamapps/common” folder.
4. When you go to install the game, select the steam library where you pasted the game files. Steam will automatically detect and import the files instead of downloading them again. It will probably still need to download a few hundred MB of new files, but you will save a LOT of downloading.