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[Neyvn]

So a While back I had an External Drive containing all my steam games, now, I am stuck with just my C Drive.
I generally have to uninstalling and reinstall games as I want to play as the C Drive is small, and thus sometimes head to the Add/Remove option in Settings. BUT It is filled with all the games from the External Harddrive still. I click Uninstall and it reads;

Code: [Select]

D:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steam.exe
The system cannot find the drive specified.
And then nothing. It doesn't remove the uninstall option or anything. I am worried that these might be taking up some space in memory or worse drive space for installing by them staying there, slowing my machine down while it attempts to constantly connect with these files. Is there a way for me to just tell it to F-Off???

See attached for example of what I see...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[nenjin]

Give this a whirl:

http://www.theeldergeek.com/manually_uninstall_programs.htm

Obligatory "If you don't know what you're doing when messing with your registry you can seriously bork your system" disclaimer.

But chances are you just have registry entries for those programs and there's not much that's actually there.

[wierd]

Before trying to manually pull weeds, here is what I would try first:

Get a reasonably sized USB stick, and plug it in. Make sure it is drive D:

Reinstall steam.

reinstall the games via steam one at a time, and then immediately uninstall them.

Uninstall steam.

That will put the system back into a sane condition while you await a proper replacement.

[Reelya]

A number of 3rd party utilities (e.g. ccleaner) can uninstall the items, and/or give you the option to remove dead entries from the installed list, then run a registry clean to remove any keys that point at non-existent files (or point at other non-existent registry entries, run two passes of regclean). It might not remove every trace of those games from the registry but it's good enough for the time until you refresh your system some day.

however some games store extra files inside your user's appdata folder (it's a hidden system folder, so you'll need to turn on views for that, and files can be in either local or roaming) or Documents, so you might go in and manually delete entire folders if you know for a fact that you don't have those games properly installed.

[nenjin]

I wouldn't use CCleaner at the moment. There's a known exploit that was slipped into updates and the installer packages.

Might be ok in a few weeks.

[Reelya]

That was only in a specific build and only on 32-bit windows platforms, it was patched out already. If you're grabbing the latest version then it's safe. And think about it, who's going to be more proactive about this not happening again than the ccleaner people? You're in fact safer with them now, since they got burned by this. The hackers will be changing targets for next time.

[Tellemurius]

You aren't able to reinstall steam onto the external drive?

[Reelya]

He's saying the external died, so the hardware itself is kaput. Now he wants to clear up the progam registrations without needing to wipe all of Windows. Also, the C drive is of limited size, so he might not be able to install/uninstall all the titles. Plus it's a complete waste of time (and bandwidth, in case he has limits) and would cause unecassry read/writes to his only working drive.

Really the best solution is to just delete registry information related to the installs, while removing any residue left over in appdata and My Documents. There will be a smattering of left-over stuff here and there, but not enough to really warrant a complete system wipe.

[wierd]

The cleanest way to do that, is to reinstall "over the top" (as far as the computer knows) onto a new external drive. As I said, a USB stick is sufficient, we are NOT going to be playing the games off it, this is just to clean up.

This is because with the drive going kaput, you lose the uninstall log data, and so 3rd party utils are likely to leave bits and pieces behind. (this is why I dont really encourage it as a solution)

You get that uninstall data back with a reinstall. (the installer knows what it did) Then you can uninstall, and it will remove all the keys created in the registry. It is the cleanest, and safest way to return the system to a sane state. A suitable drive can be obtained for like, 30$ at walmart.

[Reelya]

If you're going to go that far, and there are significant GBs of games to do this for it would probably be cleaner to back up data and reinstall Windows from scratch, especially since the whole point is that there is no external drive available for that.

Adding and removing the games like that is likely to leave some traces of detritus even at the best of times, so a clean Windows install would be best if you're worried about small amounts of detritus.

[nenjin]

Stuff left in User/AppData/ is generally ok if it's left behind. Hell, most of the time games don't totally remove that stuff anyways since it contains save files and user config settings.