So, let’s say you have a computer with 2-4 internal hard drives, and you’ve got various programs, mostly games, installed on one of the other drives, but mapped to the C:/ drive. What happens when you wipe the C: drive and install a new Linux distro on it?
Yes, Steam is a part of this picture. As is Epic, GOG, and Amazon Games.
I imagine that the games are still on the drives that you installed them on; G:/, D:/, H:/, and so on. That and all the typical files that people try to back up (pictures, documents, etc.). However, does installing a new OS on the C:/ drive muck things up with your setup since these games are mapped to C:/? If so how, and what work-arounds worked for you?
The simple answer is you will need to reinstall them. I have a machine with 3 x SSD and 1 x Large HDD and while basic data is fine (docs, photos, etc) you can’t just install a new Linux OS in place of Windows on Disk 1 then expect Windows games installed on other drives (2-4) to run under Linux. The file systems are also different and NTFS from Windows environment is not the ideal one to have games installed on running in Linux, IME.
You will need to reinstall the Linux version of the game (or of Steam and the game or similar). Or you need to reinstall the Windows version of the game with WINE running on Linux, or inside Bottles, or use Proton or similar. A Windows version installed under Windows OS will not run with Linux (even with WINE) if it wasn’t installed originally in Linux via WINE AFAIK.
Having said that some games that can be moved to new locations easily without reinstalling (i.e. pickup the whole directory and move or copy it) might be possibly doable… But probably just not worth the effort trying as you likely need to put them in a Windows VM inside Linux I think, rather than run them in Linux itself…
…BUT someone more knowledgable on running Windows games in Linux may know a practical way I don’t to do what you want. It may be possible to get those existong installs on other (NTFS) discs to run under WINE?
Cleaner, quicker, and better to just reinstall them.
you should first try the things that work on Linux, for example Steam, logically having an account will let you download everything again, the Windows directories may have different structure than the Linux ones
when you hit something that can’t work natively on Linux you proceed with Wine or even Virtual Machine
The great thing about Steam is that a lot of saved games are backed up on their cloud, so I won’t loose everything, but there will be a shit ton of time that I will have to put in to reinstalling everything that I’m using. Also, there are games that used to work on Windows only which now run on many Linux distros (which is why SteamOS is finding so much success). The list of games that only work on Windows has shrunk considerably. There are Linux distros for gamers now that seriously diminish the need for WINE or have WINE protocols already optimized. See the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONhjc2lzX7o&t=304s
However, I’m glad to know that I should go through the effort of manually uninstalling all my games before switching the OS to a Linux distro. That will actually save me a lot of headache, and that’s probably the main thing I wanted to learn from the community.
So, Microsoft left one last poison pill that I didn’t see coming. The other internal hard drives that were in my computer, but didn’t have windows 11 installed on them WERE STILL ENCRYPTED BY BITLOCKER!!! In the background, without my consent, without telling me that they were being encrypted. Just BOOM. I installed Nobara, tried to open the other hard drives with Dolphin, and it asks for a password. I try to vibe code with the Konsole and find out they are Bitlocker encrypted.
I tried to vibe code how to decrypt them with their recovery keys, but no luck. Ended up having to reinstall Nobara because my attempts to vibe code how to decrypt those hard drives somehow ended up borking the OS. My last shot before reformatting them and wiping everything on them (something I don’t want to do) is to take them out of the computer and plug them in externally via adapters to a computer that still runs windows and see if I can get them decrypted that way. At the very least transfer the data on them to an external hard drive (that hopefully doesn’t get stealth encrypted like these internal hard drives), plug them back in and reformat them.
That is unless anyone else has a better technical solution. Otherwise this is for your situational awareness. Win11 will encrypt other internal hard drives on your computer without telling you.
One of them I’m positive had no data on it until I plugged it in to the computer and started using it. Another, I think, came with the computer so it was probably formatted prior to shipping. Still I don’t remember formatting the 2TB nvme before I started using it, although it was brand new.
Oh, I wrote the keys down. After deactivating the TPM in the bios, bitlocker didn’t like that and made me use another computer to pull up the keys so I could unencrypt my computer every time I started it up.