How to run SimCity 4 from an external hard drive?
Nov 21, 2014

Do you really want to run SimCity 4 on your computer but you have not enough space on your hard drive? Well, you can always buy a bigger one to replace your old one but what if you have a spare one gathering dust at a corner? Or if you have a 500GB external hard drive?

Ever wondered how to run SimCity 4 from an external hard drive? 

I will show you how on this quick tutorial.


Goal: Our goal here is to save as much memory space as possible in our primary hard drive (that i'll reffer as C: to simplify things but, in your case the name may change). To do this we wil have to have a secondary hard drive (duh!). This may either be a second Internal HardDrive or an ExternalHardDrive. We will do the following steps:

1. Install the game in our secondary drive (That we will call D:  yours might be called differently);

2. Set the game to load plugin from the D: HardDrive;



Before you get all exited there are some points you have to bare in mind before you actually decide to go through with this:

First of all you'll have to install SimCity on the computer you're plaing it in. When you install any program in a computer, the installer does basically two things: it copies the necessary files for the program to run into your computer AND it adds the program to the registry list (it's basically where all the programs are listed so, when you tell the computer to run a program, it goes trought the list and, when it finds the entry on the list, it tells the computer where to find the files it needs to work).

The first thing you have to understand is that if you install the game in a computer and then you want to take it to another one, it wont work. This is because the other computer doesn't have the game in it's registry and so, it wont know where to go and what to do with the files. Because of this, if you decide to take the game you saved into your External HardDrive to play it on another computer, you will have to install the game again.

It is also convenied to have this second hard drive always plugged in. This is because windows sometimes randomly changes the letters of the disks causing the program not to lauch. Obviously it is necessary to have it plugged in during the game as it will be continuously reading and righting from and into the disk.

Another is to do with speed. All hardware is connected through cables to your computer. This cables, depending on its purpose can have many shapes and be made from different materials. These materials will dettermine the velocity at wich data passes through the cabble. An External HardDrive is usually connected to your computer either via firewire or a USB connection. An Internal HardDrive will be connected in a different way. The reason I'm blabing about this is because USB and FireWire cables were not designed to work as an IHD connection. Because of this their velocity is slower and the data can take a bit linger to be transfered. This can result in a bit of a lag in the game.
But if you consider it worth it or you just want to give it a try it's up to you.  

This being said, lets get into the good stuff!!

If you are a gamer already remember to ALWAYS BACK THINGS UP BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING!! We will be messing with two 'parts' of the game, one located in your 'program files' and another in 'my documents'.

We will have to re-install the game all over. Insert (or mount) disk 1.
As soon as you run the game, it will prompt you for the directory where you want to install it. This is the location on your disk where all the essential files are going to be. The default directory the game assumes will be something like

C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\SimCity 4

But this is just a suggestion. Now, in this tutorial, we want to save as much space on C: as possible. So we will tell SimCity 4 we want it do be installed in D: instead, like so:

D:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\SimCity 4

And then we'll click next. The progress bar should show up and you should ear your D: drive being written. Insert disk 2 when asked. And, if everything goes according to plan the installation should be successful.
First step, DONE.

Now, if you don't have many experience dealing with programs and software you may find this a bit tricky but, if we've gone so far we wont give up now!
If you were to run the game now, it would work normaly: it would go to D: for the basic files but it would go to C: to load all your regions and plugins that are in a folder called 'SimCity 4' in your 'My Documents' folder. But, if we want to save space in C: why would we want to put all our adorable downloaded content in C:?? We will now tell SimCity 4 that we want it to load everything from our D: drive.

To make finding stuff easier, what I did was to copy the 'SimCity 4' folder from 'My Documents' in C: to D:. This will keep all the sub-forders inside it organised so that the game will recognise the organisation and structure.

If you take a look at your desktop you will see a new shortcut there that will look something like this

If not you can make one by boing into Start>Programs>Maxis>Sim City 4 and right click on the icon that looks like the above, hover over 'Send To' and click 'Desktop(shortcut)'.

Now once you have the shortcut on your desktop, here's what you'll do:
Right click on the icon and it will appear what is called the 'Context Menu'. Hover to 'Properties' and left click.
A new window will appear:

Now, here's the trick. We will ADD (DO NOT ERASE what's in there) to the target the following:
(do a SPACE after what is there and write)

-UserDir:"D:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\SimCity 4\"

What this will do is to tell the game that the User File, the one we'll put our stuff in, is in disk D: inside the folder 'Documents and Settings' inside 'User', inside 'My Documents' and last, inside 'SimCity 4'.
You don't have to have all these folders inside folders. I did it this way so as to follow a normal structure, similar to the one that would be created if installed in C:.

Remember to put the backwards slash in the end so as to tell the game there will be more folders inside it. If you forget, the game will automatically create some sub-folders on it's own although I'm not sure how stable are then later on.

If the path contains spaces (like our exemple does), you'll have to put it inside quotes ( " " ).

Hit 'Apply' and 'OK' and you are done!

If you follow everything to the letter you shold have no problems at all. However, if you do, post a reply here and I'll see what I can come up with.

Enjoy your game!!!!!!

Original thread and followup comments at Simtropolis: How to run SimCity 4 from an external hard drive?