Hello all,
I need to reinstall Windows. I have GOG games on a different drive. I also save icons for GOG games. If I reinstall Windows and put icons back, will I be able to use GOG games on a different drive without reinstalling them?

Thanks,

Yes, though you'll have to do some extra work to make that happen. You'd probably be better off just reinstalling them. Once you reinstall windows the newly installed Windows will not have any knowledge of where or what the programs are. You will still be able to access the drives and possibly run some of the games directly (depending on how many dependencies they share with windows) Older one will probably run, newer ones probably won't, but every game is different so there's no real way to know.

Adding the icons won't really tell windows anything other than "that's an icon that i want on my desktop," Windows still doesn't know or care what it is and therefore won't have any of the necessary associations set up for it.

This question seems to come up every other day. Gog provides installers for all its games. You can download these and save them as backups. When you need them, just run the installer, simple. If you mean you have them all installed and want to copy that you will have problems. Any reason other than laziness not to keep your machine clean? I have max 2-3 games installed at any one point.

Well it does tell what executable should be launched and where that is located, but unfortunately more and more programs are coded to be completely incapable of using the resources around them and just rely on Windows registry to tell them a path to use for.

It is the very reason I install my games on a notebook and then copy them over to my gaming PC, to find out and backup the required registry keys so that I don't need the installers to get the games running after I build a new PC. If I want to clean my PC, I will just restore my OS partition from a backup and that's it, whenever I feel like playing some of my games, I just copy a shortcut to my desktop and if the game doesn't launch, I will merge whatever registry keys it needs and/or install any missing Visual C++ libraries and driver updates. There is no point to delete a game from my 3TB gaming disk unless I am 100% sure that nothing will ever make me want to play it again.

SSDs are a different matter, but if I run out of space, I just copy some of the games to the 3TB disk and leave them there until I wish to play them again.

So, it takes you less time to track down all the registry updates, dependencies, and such like, than it does to double click and installer and wait until its finished? Fine, me I can't afford the equivalent of 16tb of HDD space sitting around having installed items which I likely will never play (in fact my 500gb ssd will likely fill after one game). You must also have watching the defrag work.

Also, very importantly remember to back up your save files! Often these are not stored in the game folder, but on the C drive in your user folder, and these will disappear if you reinstall Windows!

It only needs to be done once or not at all per game, then I never have to run the installer again as I can just plug the disk to a new PC and merge .reg-files when necessary. After the initial investment the games can be played at a later date far more likely than if I would need to spend time on reinstalling them again.

Defrag doesn't do much if one doesn't constantly install and delete stuff, I intend to eventually move all my savegames to a separate disk and after that the only real cause for some serious fragmentation might come from deleted screenshots. Copying the games into a new disk every two or three years will take care of that and create an extra backup for me.

But the main reason why I make installing games so complicated process for me, is the fact that if could not make the game run on a different computer than where I installed it, I would simply not play it until that issue is resolved. Also if I ever move over to Linux, I can skip getting the installers to accept the emulated environment and just concentrate on getting the games themselves to work.

Hold your horses,
Some of you think I'm "lazy" not keeping my PC clean. No, it's not true. I got a new motherboard and new CPU chip which I still have GOG games on my 2nd hard drive. I have to reinstall Windows 10 to accept my new motherboard and make images from Acronis TrueImage.

That's why I was asking if I need to reinstall GOG games. Steam games do not need to be reinstall. However, I'm going to reinstall GOG games then make an image of my C to contain links for second hard drive.

And others, thanks for helping me on this to decide.

Cheers, THartmann9374