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Moving LB to a different drive?


dmaker

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Is there a simple way to do this? Currently I have all of my roms and emulators in various subfolders of c:\emulation. However, the 128GB SSD is almost full, thus restricting me from any more emus. This htpc does have an external 240 GB SSD connected via an esata dock. This was being used for photos, but I have all my photos backed up to Google and Amazon and my internal Qnap NAS. I really have no need to keep these photos on this external drive any longer. Would it be fairly simple to "forklift" everything from one drive to the other, do you think? Thank-you!
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If you move your ROMs and they are in a relative path in LaunchBox it shouldn't be an issue if they are in fullpath in LB then you will need to use Notepadd++ in order to change the paths as a third scenario if all you roms where moved to your LaunchBox folder you can easily just move the whole LB install. Moving paths is not built into LaunchBox that is why I say use Notepad++ it is an invaluable tool for editing your XML quickly and easily. If you need to do so and I'll either explain the process or link you to a post that explains the process.
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The roms are in a separate folder from LB. All the metadata etc is in the default users folders, but the actual roms and emus are in a different folder. Sounds like I will need to use Notepad++ to find and replace. Which xml file do I need to parse?
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LaunchBox.xml. This is your main XML. Make sure to make a backup. To make it simple, if all that is changing is the drive letter only replace the drive letter. So for example say you have a file path of D:\Emulators\\ etc. Only search for D:\ and replace it with your new drive letter, say F:\. Just move your "Emulators" folder or what ever it is called for the easiest move possible.
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That is what I thought as well, but N++ is coming up empty when I try to search for C:\ When I look inside the xml, I do not see the whole path. It is truncated with ... For example: ..\..\..\emulation\N64 Roms\Madden Football 64 (U) [!].z64 false
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Yeah so you can replace that path with the new one if necessary if you move to your external with the same exact file structure ie the same exact path except the drive letter being changed than it may work without any fiddling.
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So you had roms in with LaunchBox, so it is using relative paths. So what we need to do is keep the "emulation" folder the same. move the Emulation folder to your new drive. Find "..\..\..\" and replace it with your new drive letter, for example, "F:\". Then start up LB and see if that worked.
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Oh yeah I've used it many times ever since Brad originally showed it to me it is great for moving whole installs to completely different computers. I noticed you have a NAS server that means you actually have the option to keep the files on your NAS and use them although I wouldn't recommend doing so for PS2 GameCube or Wii games really anything else and network storage works rather well. Of course that is assuming that you can access your NAS server from file explorer using the \\Network computer name\shared folder\platform\game. My experience is with Windows Severs and they have the same file access as a regular networked computer I've never used a NAS but know a little about them but I don't know if you can access the files in the same matter or if you have to jump through extra hoops like while trying to access an Android phone through file explorer ie mapping a network location and using ftp to access the phone.
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I can certainly use my NAS to access the files. I could so via SMB ( Windows file sharing), or even iscsi (my Qnap supports iscsi). I was concerned about performance. I would rather load a large xml file and thousands of images and videos from local SSD, rather than a network drive.
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Yeah I don't keep any of my ROMs in LaunchBox so I only use the server for ROMs those. LaunchBox and the emulators are kept locally on every computer as are most ROMs except a few of the simpler systems but even with my laptops where space is an issue they access all of my PS1 and Saturn games from the server and I don't see any performance issues with them most of them won't emulate anything higher than those systems so I've never really tried it with Dolphin or PCSX2.
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I had this issue, my ssd was filling up and i wanted to move some large collections to a HDD. Here is what i did it only takes a few seconds ( well depending on the size of the folder you want to move ). Download this program, what it does is moves the folder/files you want to move to your new drive but it will leave a symbolic folder behind so that launchbox still thinks those files/folder is still on the original drive but in fact it on another drive. https://dirlinker.codeplex.com/
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  • 1 year later...

My sincerest apologies if I am repeating stuff issues that have already been addressed, however I have searched forums and can’t find an appropriate response, so as the noob that I am I have to ask again-

 

problem: running out space on c drive which is a small SSD

background:

lanchbox/bigbox app is hosted on C drive with shortcuts on the desktop

emulators  and roms are hosted on D drive

 

Question:

Can I just move launchbox to D drive and my problem goes away or do I have to edit .xml files and relink to D drive?

 

many thanks and apologies if I have repeated stuff others may have asked previously..

 

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It depends how it is set up really best thing to do is copy your LB folder to D without removing it from C and try testing it to see what is and what isn't working. It will depend how you set it up on how portable it is, If it isn't working on D come back here and post and we will help you troubleshoot it further.

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10 hours ago, DOS76 said:

It depends how it is set up really best thing to do is copy your LB folder to D without removing it from C and try testing it to see what is and what isn't working. It will depend how you set it up on how portable it is, If it isn't working on D come back here and post and we will help you troubleshoot it further.

Thanks Dos76- not sure why I didn't think about that myself given I just did the same type of thing with my Dropbox folder. 

I will give it a shot and see what happens

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