Moving ESO to different drive.

ajm1946 · January 2018

I have 2 questions:

1 - My SSD on my PC is full and with ESO taking up 120 GB of this I want to move ESO to my 2 TB 'D' Drive - Is this possible, if so how is it done ?

2 - I have also just purchased a Gaming Laptop and want install a copy of ESO on it - SSD is 512 GB so space not an Issue - How can I do this without having to do a complete download of ESO and PTS ?

Kimba_Do · January 2018

While it is technically possible to move a program from one location to another on your hard drive, getting it to work again is another story altogether. The majority of settings for a program are stored in the windows registry. Unless you are extremely knowledgeable, going in there and trying to change things is a real good way to have to reinstall windows.

I had this issue with my DAW software just last week. I moved my work files to a storage location, uninstalled the software and reinstalled to the desired drive. Time-consuming, but it's the best way to keep things working correctly.

Loc2262 · January 2018

Faced with the same issue, albeit the other way round (I have my Steam games installed on an HDD and wanted the central ESO files on my SSD for speeding it up), I use NTFS reparse points aka. hardlinks/junctions for that purpose.

I.e. I moved the folder "Zenimax Online\The Elder Scrolls Online\depot" from HDD to SSD (in your case it'd be the other way round) and created a junction "depot" in its original place, pointing to the depot folder on the other drive. To create the junction, you can use a tool from SysInternals:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/junction

A reparse point is similar to a ".lnk" file e.g. a symbol on your desktop, a shortcut to another file, but it resides "deeper" in the file system structure. To regular software, like file managers or a game, a reparse point appears transparent and redirects all accesses to the target directory.