Steam and flashdrives

[slayer20]

Straight to the point, Steam should be able to be installed on Flash Drives.

I'm not sure how big Steam is without any games, but I have a 4gb flashdrive that might be big enough to hold Steam and Half-Life (I have half-life installed with about 3 or 4 mods installed and it's just about 1.7gb big, with other custom content too.)

I don't see why Steam can't be installed on a flashdrive aslong as it has the space.

I know that if you were to install any games on it, that it might not run on the computer you plug it into, but that doens't mean we shouldn't be able to use Steam Friends Chat, look up games on steam (and if you have a main computer you play on, just log onto it and install the game you purchased), check out community pages, etc etc...

Some things to consider:
*Kids may not be able to play Steam at their school. My school has every music, game, entertainment site blocked. It has everything from solitare to minesweeper deleted. It's not possible for anyone to play games on their computer without permission.
*This would be good because you wouldn't have to install Steam on every computer you go on to (if you get on a lot of computers).
*A bad thing would be that if someone has lost their flashdrive, then they'd better hope that whoever finds it gives it back, and that they don't get on your steam account...or that you've logged off steam.

Is this a bad idea? If so, why?

[AciD]

It works on removable USB space storages.
Just do a clean install on your disk than copy files onto drive.


Keep in mind that if you may lose your game files if you reinstall Steam on your pc.

[slayer20]

Ah, so I can just install steam on a different computer, and move everything to my flashdrive?

I was tempted to try this, but I figured I'd post about being able to install it directly to your flashdrive.

[AciD]

Yep.
You could create folder called Steam on your flash drive and copy Steam.exe inside it. Navigate to Steamapps folder inside your Steam installation directory and find file called winui.gcf.
On your flash drive inside Steam folder create new folder named Steamapps and copy winui.gcf into that folder.

Steam should download rest of required files.

[slayer20]

Well that's just dandy!

Thanks! Now to see if I can fit both steam and half-life on this thing :P

[techman95]

awesome... I just browsed this topic in google because I was wondering myself. THANKS so much for the help. I had to log in to let ya know... thanks again.

[HarryKim]

Yea it works. I just copied my existing steam folder and the games I wanted to my flash drive. You might want to clean your appcache folder first though because mine contained like 10k tiny files that would have taken forever to copy. Some people say even USB 2.0 transfer rates are too slow to load games and maps quickly enough, but it works fine with Bad Company 2. The first time I ran steam off it it too a while to load though.