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Alright. I'm trying to move my games (from one drive to another), but as you know there is close to no possible way to do so.. Without redownloading it. No thanks to the recent client updates, simply copying the files over (and uninstalling the old location) does not help at all.

So: Is there any way to get Steam to redownload, and then instantly make it complete (then copy the files over)? (That means not redownloading the game again. Instead, it downloads nothing and the game is marked as downloaded.. But no actual files are downloaded. Instead, the source is the game files, untouched, and NOT in as a "backup1")

1 Backup = .csd, .csm and .sku files in the [Game Name]\Disk_[# No.][ID]depotcache[# Num].csm etc. format and file structure.

Question: How do you trick Steam into starting a download, and then "instantly" finish it without downloading a thing? As the solution in this post does not work. Or it may be because I'm on a beta build.

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  • What solutions have you tried and which didn't work? Commented May 7, 2014 at 11:40
  • Have you tried the second highest voted solution in the duplicate question? It's entirely different.
    – MrLemon
    Commented May 7, 2014 at 13:01
  • There is now way to complete this move instantly. The first solution on the linked question worked for me, but still took me some time to validate the installation.
    – MBraedley
    Commented May 7, 2014 at 17:56
  • What I discovered on accident when moving my games to new steam folders is that if it's registered to your account so that it shows up in your library, Game files will transfer over, and when you 'download' the game in your library all it does is it verifies the game file integrity (not pirated) and then is playable from steam. It's not instant, but other than the file transfer, it takes no more than 5-10 seconds for verification. Commented May 8, 2014 at 0:11
  • The renaming of the manifest file and the copy-pasting method (the very top one).. Backup did not work for half of them as they either failed to check verification (of cache) or were out of date. All above, all it did was redownload (from scratch, even those whose were matched and with the manifests changed or just copy-pasted)
    – aytimothy
    Commented May 8, 2014 at 12:44

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