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LAN Party Forums => Support Group => Started by: BurntIce on February 27, 2008, 06:41:12 PM
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Hey all, I know its been awhile, but hopefully I'll be able to get back into the LAN side of things soon. I have a question about dual booting two versions of XP: when installing programs, and specifically Steam, how should I go about this? I have a RAID that I wanted to install all of my programs to, but I'm not sure if I will need seperate installs for each version of XP. This stemmed from the question of whether Steam will know which versions of games to launch (there are updated versions of games like HL2 for 64 bit). This wouldn't be a problem if I didn't have so many programs/games/etc to install, which will probably fill up the partitions I made for the OSs. So yeah... I'm guessing I probably need seperate installs, but if anyone knows of a way to manually edit registrys or some such witchcraft it would be great if you could share. Thanks for the help!
- Sam R
PS: anyone know when the next LAN is????
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The short and simple answer is yes, you'll need separate installs. You can try to do shared installs, but you'll have to do a lot of registry editing and maybe some other program specific files to make sure the drive letters are pointing to the right place.
To help you out with that, Google a program called RegReplace. It lets you do a global search and replace for registry keys/values. So for example, you could search for "C:\Program Files\" and have it replace all instances of that with "D:\Program Files" or whatever you go about it.
I think you'll find though that it's a major hassle to go about it this way (if you can get it to work at all) and just end up installing things twice.
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Seperate installs, if you run a RAID you can do partitions. I would recommend just running XP64, I have been for years and the driver support has matured.
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Just a thought... no clue if this would work, but worth a try... You can install most applications wherever you want as long as you do a custom install. What if you did the following:
XP32 (OS running on C: drive) - custom install steam to C:\games\steam.
XP64 (OS running on D: drive) - custom install steam to the same exact folder, C:\games\steam, if it recognizes it already exists, tell it to do something like a repair install. Worst case, it won't proceed, so rename the C:\games\steam folder to something else, say steam_old, then proceed with the custom install in XP64 to C:\games\steam
If this works, it shouldn't matter which OS you use to get steam to download the games, with luck, steam in the other OS will recognize all the same file binaries and profiles. If it does work, delete the steam_old dir as it's not needed anymore.