More Awesome Than You!

I have finally got a new, bigger hard drive for my computer and I'm planning to completely remove my old one and transfer everything to the new one, including my Sims 2 games.

Currently I have all the expansion packs and some of the stuff packs so obviously I'm going to have to install them all again on the new hard drive. Some of the stuff packs however I downloaded from the EA Store so I have no hard copy of the CD-ROMs. Am I going to be able to redownload them with no problems, bearing in mind that any cached information on my computer is not going to be on the new hard drive? (I'm assuming it stores necessary information under my account information on their server, but you never know with EA.) I've searched the EA store but there doesn't seem to be any information on this.

Secondly I know there has been discussion on this before but there doesn't ever seem to have been a definite conclusion. To patch or not to patch? Currently my game is patched up to Pets and I have the original FT patch, but in between those I never bothered and my game runs fine. Should I patch as I go along anyway?

Finally (and I know this is a long shot, which may make my previous to questions irrelevant) is there anyway if I stick the two hard drives in together to just copy the entire lot over to the new hard drive without having to install again? Normally I wouldn't even bother trying that but I've lost my BV CD and the idea of downloading a torrent fills me with dread simply because my internet connection is ridiculously slow. I'm assuming it wouldn't work because the registary keys would still be on the old hard drive and it would mash up all the links which point to the internal files. Just thought I'd ask though because I'm clutching at straws here. It's going to take long enough to install all the expansion packs I have the CDs for without waiting hours days to download something I technically already own.

I only found one registry entry per EP that was about the install folder and needed changing when I moved my folders around, so it might be quicker to do it that way :) I didn't quite do what you're doing - I just got a bigger drive which I partitioned into two drives of different sizes, uninstalled every game bar TS2, copied everything into the small one, and then moved documents and TS2 onto the bigger partition. The reason I reinstalled everything but TS2 is that changing the million cds and dvds would have been more trouble than editing things manually for this game, and even an installation like that is way less trouble than what you'd have to do, so... XD

I never patched anything, as far as I can recall. If the 'updating your game' thing actually does nothing, then I've always played an unpatched game and sorted out anything I deemed a bug with third-party fixes. It's worked for me for all these years, and if it worked for you before you may as well carry on. :)

I don't know anything at all about the EA Store, though. Sorry :( Good luck with all this, whatever you do! :)

When you install a new EP or SP, it usually installs all of the patches that were available when the EP / SP was released.  So, you likely have almost all of the patches.

^ I don't think that's true. If you're talking about the "checking to see if your game is up to date" thing, I think it only checks for the base game patch or something. It usually takes a second and then comes to a "your game is already up to date" message, and I've had that happen even if I hadn't installed several patches for some EPs.

Newer packs have patches for Pets and Seasons, IIRC. And maybe BV too, I can't remember...

In a "normal case"  it should be possible, to attach the new HDD to the computer, without removing the old drive and make a 1:1 copy, so you wouldn't have to install anything. How to go about that, depends on several things... IDE or SATA-Drives, what copy-software is available etc. Drag and drop in Explorer does not work (at least not for anything that matters, like OS, Registry etc.), that's for sure. You'll need so called "drive Cloning" soft like Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image etc.

-le

You could just ghost the image of your drive with Norton's ghost image software. Makes an exact copy.

Whoops, Leticron beat me to it, teach me not to read the post when the little red message pops up.

Thanks for the advice. I think I'll make one last attempt to find my BV CD and if that fails I'll go with the ghost imaging thing.

Assuming I do find my CD (unlikely at this point, but still) and end up reinstalling does anyone have any knowledge/experience with how the EA store reacts in these circumstances. Is it going to let me redownload or is it going to throw a fit and refuse?