How To Move MegaSceneryEarth To Another Drive
This is also available as a video tutorial here.
One thing about photoscenery is that it occupies a large amount of hard drive space. That's the price for unique authentic scenery as opposed to generic "simulated" scenery. You may find as you add areas to your collection that your hard drive space may be running out and therefore need to expand your storage space on your PC.
The beauty of the FSX/P3D Scenery Library system is that your scenery BGL files can exist anywhere on your PC, on any drive whether it's an internal drive, a portable external hard drive or even a networked drive.
It's easy and very affordable to purchase an external USB3 portable hard drive. A 4 Tb drive only costs around $120 to $150 and 4 Tb is a lot of storage space. The performance of USB3 drives is good enough to display MegaSceneryEarth with better than reasonable performance. It's not quite as good as internal storage but still satisfactory. Windows caching continues to work on external drives so you get the enjoy the benefit of caching which further enhances performance.
Moving MegaSceneryEarth to another drive is just a 2 step process of 1. Moving the files to the new drive and 2. Setting up the pointers in FSX/P3D.
Follow these procedures.
In this instance we will move all of your MegaSceneryEarth files from C: Drive to G: Drive
- Locate the folder C:\MegaSceneryEarth
- Right click and select CUT
- Open your G: drive in Windows Explorer. Right click in the G: drive window and select Paste. The folder will be moved across.
- When the process is complete, then follow the instructions found here to change the pointers in your scenery library so that it points to folders in G:\MegaSceneryEarth
A couple of caveats
- A slightly safer method is to select COPY instead of CUT in step 2. This will copy the data instead of move it. Once you have verified that the data has been moved you can delete the C:\MegaSceneryEarth folder.
- After making these changes, your uninstallers will not work correctly. It won't affect the operation of your scenery or operating system and if you try to run the uninstallers as some future Windows will simply tell you it can find the files and give you the option to remove the uninstaller.
In this instance we will move one of your MegaSceneryEarth areas from C: Drive to G: Drive. We will use Florida as an example.
- Open your G: drive and create the folder MegaSceneryEarth
- Go back to your C: drive and locate the folder C:\MegaSceneryEarth\Florida
- Right click on the Florida folder and select CUT
- Open your G: drive in Windows Explorer. Open the MegaSceneryEarth folder. Right click in the window and select Paste. The folder will be moved across.
- When the process is complete, then follow the instructions found here to change the pointers in your scenery library so that it points to folder G:\MegaSceneryEarth\Florida
A couple of caveats
- A slightly safer method is to select COPY instead of CUT in step 2. This will copy the data instead of move it. Once you have verified that the data has been moved you can delete the C:\MegaSceneryEarth\Florida folder
- After making these changes, your uninstallers will not work correctly. It won't affect the operation of your scenery or operating system and if you try to run the uninstallers as some future Windows will simply tell you it can find the files and give you the option to remove the uninstaller.
What can go wrong
If you do not set up the pointers correctly then your scenery will not display and you will get Scenery.cfg errors on startup. If this happens to you, use the document found here to fix those errors.