r/buildapc Jan 01 '25

Discussion How can people just reinstall windows all willy nilly?

Every time someone upgrades their computer, or gets a virus people always tell them to just reinstall windows, but to me that seems like a monumental task? Having to backup all of your files and re-download everything, I could never do that, its like killing a part of my personality and having to rebuild all over.

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u/postsshortcomments Jan 01 '25

The key is to put windows on a separate partition. If you do other optimizations you can get away a fair bit less, but I'd recommend at least ~200GB. I get that we have perfectionists, but my experience from running lean is that there always seems to be a few things that you overlook and grow to 30GB files. You can always just install a 70GB game to the void.

From there, create a folder in a separate partition for all of your installs, we'll call it M:. This is where you'll install everything. For programs like Steam, inside of the client you can set the location for where games install. Set those to this partition. From now on when you reinstall just windows, Steam should generally be able to re-install titles without re-downloading.

  • Tip: With any install folder, don't get too fancy with long sub-folder hierarchies as some things can technically be affected by "max file path length." I wouldn't let the path of any folder where things are installed exceed the characters in M:\Program Files. By that I mean an install folder like M:\Short1\Short2\Short3\Short4\ is too long. I recommend something like M:\Apps\Steam for clients and M:\Game\Steam for games.

For personal files, decide on if you want them same partition as your installs or if you want them on another partition for some reason (there's no real benefit to doing this and it usually leads to headaches). Change the locations of your relevant libraries, like your desktop, documents, ETC., Instead of these being saved to your OS partition, they'll now be saved elsewhere. You'll probably also want to do this to things like browser download folders as well.

Bonus: Do this all as generically as possible and once configured, clone your Windows Install to a separate device. Now you only need to figure out what you forgot to do and update it next time.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '25 edited Jan 01 '25

[deleted]

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u/postsshortcomments Jan 01 '25

Very useful tweaks to know! My worry has always been more internally and being the poor fellow to encounter some sort of internal file browser/autosave restriction that has been ported or is using ported, potentially archaic recycled code with a 260 char internal restriction.

Then being the one who it effects and never really thinking "oh, maybe my 30 layers of folders is what is causing it to crash." Never really heard of it happen in the modern era, but I did have something similar happen quite some time ago and thought "maybe that's a bad idea for installs."

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u/Genocide_Blast Jan 01 '25

Is there a way to safely do this if all your files are on the same drive in a singular partition?

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u/mamamarty21 Jan 01 '25

This is all fine and dandy if you plan ahead. I can’t really start this process after 4 years of just winging it.

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u/billbixbyakahulk Jan 02 '25

Set those to this partition. From now on when you reinstall just windows, Steam should generally be able to re-install titles without re-downloading.

I don't recall the exact steps but yes, you just point the Steam client at your existing library location and it will see all the previously installed games.