BF2 on drive D: and windows on C:. What happens if I format

AirborneTR · Post by **AirborneTR** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 5:21 pm

Hi there,

I have windows installed on drive C: and BF2 on drive D:. Now will BF2 work if I format C and install windows again? I guess no because registry will be gone. Can anything be done about that, or was it a bad idea to install BF2 on a separate drive

?

gribble · Post by **gribble** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 5:52 pm

haven't tried this with bf2, but it worked with bf42:

- make a backup of your bf installation dir
- format.. reinstall windows
- do a basic bf installation
- copy your backup of bf over the new installed one

voila, everything should work.. you have your registry keys and all the important files. what you might miss is some start-menue entrys from mods or whatsoever

DaGrooved1 · Post by **DaGrooved1** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 6:02 pm

Why don't you just copy the BF2 registry file to your D: Drive, then when you wipe your C: Drive, you simply have to go into your D drive and install the BF2 registry file.

Yorp · Post by **Yorp** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 6:58 pm

Dont forget to make a copy of the Battlefield 2 dir which is in your My Documents dir. If that is on your C drive.

AirborneTR · Post by **AirborneTR** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 7:06 pm

haven't tried this with bf2, but it worked with bf42:

- make a backup of your bf installation dir
- format.. reinstall windows
- do a basic bf installation
- copy your backup of bf over the new installed one

Well, this is not so much different than reinstalling BF2 but I guess there is no other way.

Why don't you just copy the BF2 registry file to your D: Drive, then when you wipe your C: Drive, you simply have to go into your D drive and install the BF2 registry file.

BF2 registry file is not a separate one (or is it?) but it has entries in windows registry. If I backup windows registry and install it after formatting C:, there will be lots of redundant entries in the registry from the previous installed programs on C:. I wish it was possible to extract only BF2 related entries from the registry and put them in later after formatting

.

Dont forget to make a copy of the Battlefield 2 dir which is in your My Documents dir. If that is on your C drive.

No it's not. My Documents are on F:. Well, I like to mix things up

Thanks for the replies.

DaGrooved1 · Post by **DaGrooved1** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 7:16 pm

Ok, I installed BF1942 on my old machine, backed it up on a DVD, put it back on my old PC after wiping it, taken the HDD out of my old one, placed it in my new one, and I can still play 1942, even though it's the original install from my old machine. All I did was use the EA CD-Key changer, but from what I've learned so far, BF2 might be a little more sensitive.

Have you thought about just wiping, then using the "repair" option in bf2 install wizard, or simply reapplying the patch and using the ea key changer to put your cd key back in?

AirborneTR · Post by **AirborneTR** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 7:47 pm

I just tried the repair thing now, but it didn't work. I deleted one registry entry of BF2 and run the repair but it didn't put it in back.

But while backing up my registry to try this I realized that you have the option to back up only a branch of registry alone. And when you double click on the back up file later it inserts that branch back in

And as far as I see the only registry branch about BF2 is in "HKLM>Software>Electronic Arts>EA Games>Battlefield 2". So I just need to back up this branch and put it in later after format.

DaGrooved1 · Post by **DaGrooved1** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 7:54 pm

That was what I meant earlier, but I decided not to reinforce the suggestion when I noticed there were many references to Battlefield 2 in the registry, but if it works for you, thats great!

AirborneTR · Post by **AirborneTR** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 8:21 pm

Ah yes I get it now

. Thanks a lot. I'll just have to try and see, at worst I'll uninstall and install BF2 again.

deathbot9000 · Post by **deathbot9000** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 10:14 pm

what happens is you'll have to jump through hoops just to make it playable again...and it'll play dodgey at best.

format C, reinstall windows, install BF2 (and all your games) onto the OS drive.

tvuk · Post by **tvuk** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 4:29 am

Why should he install everything on C:? He has to reinstall everything but he'd have to do that anyway if he formatted C:. The best way is to put windows only on C and everything else on D:. That way if windows totaly crashes you don't lose any of your files.

AirborneTR · Post by **AirborneTR** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 4:48 am

My reasoning for installing BF2 on a separate drive was to avoid disk fragmentation. I installed BF42, BF2 (and some other games that I keep on the system always and never uninstall) to drive D. So, Drive D will not need defragmentation (I hope

). Client data verification is really fast compared to before (actually I increased the RAM also) and I guess that verification time might increase in time if I installed BF2 on C with other programs and drive C starts fragmented as I install and uninstall other things.

But having games on a different drive may create problems so I'm not sure what is the right thing to do. Actually not all games will suffer beacause before I had Doom3 on drive E, and after formatting C, it was working without a problem.

Maybe I shall consider partitioning my disk again. What would you suggest for a 250GB HDD?

Now it's like:

C:15GB - system
D:60GB - BF series and others
E:80GB - other programs
F:rest - storage

Yorp · Post by **Yorp** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 5:05 am

That looks OK to me, if got something like that and it works for me.
btw, if you make a dynamic disk of your disk you can always expand a volume(partition) with the space which is not yet allocated.

Rhat_Bhastard · Post by **Rhat_Bhastard** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 12:24 pm

Most of the crap that builds up and causes fragmentation is in the windows system directory, so dedicating a partition/drive to this is a pretty good idea. Another idea is to dedicate a partition/drive to your pagefile to keep it contiguous- windows NT family OSes tend to write everything to the pagefile then page it into memory, which is why you get so much disk-grindage when loading big processes into memory like BF2- Not only is it writing it into RAM, it's also writing it back to disk! *grrrr*

For evidence of this, open the task manager, go to the performance tab, and direct your attention to the PF usage meter. This indicates how much space is in use in your on-disk pagefile. Compare this to your commit-charge total, which is how much memory in total you are using. These numbers stay pretty close to one another, which to me indicates that in-use memory is paged into the pagefile in normal operation. I assume it is paged out at the time the process is loaded into memory or very shortly after.

I'm sure if there are any true Windows geeks here they will correct my inaccuracies, but this info is distilled from some serious research into gearhead sites in the neverending quest to get decent performance of of my windoze machines.

tvuk · Post by **tvuk** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 12:25 pm

It doesn't make sense to have unallocated space at all. Just create normal partitions with all the space allocated to them and you'll be fine.