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This deserves a topic of its own, apparently, so here’s how I did it — without a bunch of snotty comments:

First off, the reason why you’d want to do this, is if you have a fast system-drive. Say, a SSD or 10/15krpm-drive. These fast drives are usually small-ish, but works wonders when loading TF2 (and/or other games). Having all Valve-games, Dragon Origins, all Colonization-games, Torchlight and all the 2€-deals of those games you just can’t be arsed to download, patch and crack (cough), fills up valuable SSD-space rather quickly. It’s nice that they load up snappy, but having a choked system-drive is not. There might be other reasons why you’d want to do this, but I leave that as an exercise to the reader to ponder upon.

Let’s assume we have steam installed somewhere simple, such as ‘C:steam’, we’ll quickly note the majority of space is taken up by the folders in the commons-directory located in steamapps. To free up this space and move it to another drive (let’s say, D: which is a large 7k2rpm drive, slow but sufficient), we’d first need to move the directories we’d like to link to the other drive.

In this example, let’s move Torchlight and CIV4BTS to D:games (that is, CUT and PASTE the directories from c:ste..commons to d:games). To make it apparent these belongs to steam, I also rename them in the destination folder with the prefix STEAM_, like d:gamesSTEAM_torchlight.

After that, we’d open up our handy command-prompt (start->run->cmd) and type:

C:\Steam\steamapps\common>mklink /D “sid meier’s civilization iv beyond the swor
d” “d:\games\STEAM_sid meier’s civilization iv beyond the sword”

symbolic link created for sid meier’s civilization iv beyond the sword <> d:\games\STEAM_sid meier’s civilization iv beyond the sword

C:\Steam\steamapps\common>mklink /D “torchlight” “d:\games\STEAM_torchlight”

symbolic link created for torchlight <> d:\games\STEAM_torchlight

C:\Steam\steamapps\common>

And it is as simple as that. This will of course work with any large folder inside the steam-hierarchy you wish to offload to another drive.

This would also work just splendid if you already have steam installed on a slow disk and recently bought an SSD and wish to move just the TF2-folder to the new drive. I’m sure you can figure out how by reading the example above.

That’s it.

cheers will be using this later :D

Nice tutorial :)