Is there any way to move the install directory without having to reinstall the game completely?
I want to move it from my HDD to SSD, is there a way to do this that doesn’t require me to uninstall/reinstall the game? The load times are absolutely insane.
It literally just took 4 minutes and 14 seconds to load into the game. Completely ludicrous.
Copy paste.
It works.
The point the launcher to the new location.
That does not work.
It’s worked multiple times for me.
What isn’t working?
I’ve tried that in the past and it just doesn’t work. It says that wow is not installed, even if I change the location in the directory to the different place.
The file will be there on the disc, but the system doesn’t seem to recognize it.
It’s worked fine every time I’ve done it in the last 10 years, as recently as early last year.
Shut down battle.net app. Don’t just hit the “x” button; it may just minimize to tray and keep running.
Move the entire directory structure from one drive to the other. Make sure the relocated directory is writeable by your computer login id (if that’s how you log in when you run WoW).
Start battle.net, select WoW from all the games on the launcher (although if you were just playing WoW it should already be selected), hit the “options” menu, select the “game settings” option, hit the “use a different folder” button and navigate to the World of Warcraft folder. Not its parent folder; select the actual “World of Warcraft” folder.
Yeah didn’t work.
“This folder doesn’t contain the correct version of this game. Please check the installation path and try again.”
Even though it does.
If I run the wow.exe from the folder, it says that an update is required and that it needs to be launched through the launcher.
Exactly what has always happened when I have done this, it doesn’t work. Thanks.
Trying again it says “Your World of Warcraft installation is damaged. To learn how to repair it, see: https://battle.net/support/article/6572” So there’s that.
This is what I get for doing what I’ve already done and know that it doesn’t work.
As far as the wow launcher is concerned, it’s not installed anywhere on my pc at all.
Moving the game via copy paste should work just fine. If it isn’t working for you it is possible that you are having some sort of permissions issue with your drives, or your installation is damaged or something. A 4 minute load time seems unusually long even for an HDD like perhaps it is malfunctioning. Outside of doing a fresh re-install, there is no way to move it besides copy and pasting.
I’ve literally never been able to just “move” the file that way. I’ve tried in the past and had the exact same problems I’m having now.
Was it on a different computer?
If you’re copying the entire playable and correct version of the game, usually in program files (x86), but you can find it for sure by clicking in the launcher the “options” and “show in explorer” choices, then copying over the base “world of warcraft” folder that has the retail and data folders in it and is like 70 gb, then pointing the launcher to the new location (for example) “d:\world of warcraft”, I’m not sure what is going wrong. I’m not sure if a permissions problem can cause that error or not - maybe a blue could offer some insight.
Nope. Same computer, from one drive to another.
Literally just drag and dropped. Access/permissions is not a problem.
At this point let’s check to see what the actual install paths look like. You really didn’t need another thread but I guess I’d answer kyzera’s question in the other one.