Whenever you need to change laptops or move an installed steam game from one hard drive to another, the process can look daunting, owing to the lack of proper instructions, for this particular scenario, that Valve offers. Fortunately, we have got you covered here. It is a very easy process and it will save you from re-downloading big games like GTA V, Homefront The Revolution, Mass Effect Andromeda, to name but a few. So let’s find out how to transfer Steam games from one hard drive to another.

Follow this guide to know how to transfer Steam Games which are installed in one PC to another PC. To do the same, in case of different hard disks, the procedure is exactly the same.

How To Transfer Steam Games From One Hard Drive To Another

The default Steam folder in C drive is C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam. Assuming your games are installed here and you want to move the games here to another PC in the E drive from that folder. Follow the steps below.

1. First, take the entire Folder of the game in your USB transfer device (Where the game is installed in the original PC).
2. Next, download Steam in the new PC and login into your account (It won’t matter if two instances of the same account are running in different PCs).
3. Select the game in your Steam library list (It will be greyed out in the list) and click on install. Select ‘Make new Steam drive in E‘ and click next. It will show ‘Preparing ‘Game Name’ files for install’.
4. Navigate to the folder where the game is installing and as soon as the folders ‘common‘, ‘downloading‘ and ‘temp‘ are created, open common folder and you will see the game folder (These folders are in the steamapps folder).
5. In Steam, click cancel and go to your USB transfer device where the game folder, taken from the original PC, is located. Copy the whole folder to the Steam installation folder in the new PC (Both game folders should have the same name) and when prompted, click Replace.
6. When copying is done, navigate to Steam and click Install on the game. It will say ‘Preparing To Create Game Files‘ and then it will say ‘Discovering existing files‘. Once it is done, your game in the list will become white, indicating that it is installed. If you enabled cloud save, all your saved data and achievements will be transferred over as well.

There, you have successfully transferred a Steam game from one PC to another without downloading.