Steam Install Fucked, how do I get my games back?

[Correction]

Sequence of events

1) Installing Civ V and the machine crashes
2) Restart, Steam won't launch
3) Attempt to uninstall Steam, Windows says 'Steam not installed, remove from add/remove programs list y/n?'
4) Click Y, attempt to install Steam
5) Installer finishes without a complaint, but Steam won't connect
6) Do some googling, eventually figure out after two reinstall attempts that a rogue steam.exe process is running, kill it.
7) Try to reinstall steam -> "Steam must install into an empty folder lol"
8) Rename old steam folder, reinstall steam

Now, how do I get my games back without reinstalling them? Can I just overwrite the 'bin' directory or is there more trickery involved?

[Neoburai]

Bad news. When you remove Steam from the add/remove programs list, it takes all your installed games/files with it.

Edit:
At least that has been my experience. Too long of a story to explain. I doubt anything has changed though.

[ZombieHeadshot]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that is case when you take Steam off your system. Although I have not done it before. The files for the games should still be in your system somewhere, other wise it would take ages to uninstall Steam + alot of games?

[Slott]

Inside the steam folder is a folder called steamapps. That's where games files are stored (not saves, the actual games)

[virusiidx]

Inside the steam folder is a folder called steamapps. That's where games files are stored (not saves, the actual games)

It happened to me before and I had to re-install Steam. But as quoted above, you should be able to grab the folder from there and move it elsewhere, re-install Steam and move the folder back in place. You should be able to "install" the games again, and it'll just check the integrity of the files within that Steamapps folder. Keep in mind though, not all Steam games are stored in steamapps for some reason.

[Egon]

I'm having another Steam install problem. I had steam and all my games on drive D. Well that drive went down, so when I try to reinstall steam on my C: drive, it comes up with an error that it can't find drive D. Kinda dumb and annoying.

[virusiidx]

I'm having another Steam install problem. I had steam and all my games on drive D. Well that drive went down, so when I try to reinstall steam on my C: drive, it comes up with an error that it can't find drive D. Kinda dumb and annoying.

The registry key is probably remembering the old drive it was installed to.

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/w...stalling_Steam

Mostly Step 9:

Delete HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Valve and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Valve (or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Valve on 64-bit Windows)

[chiyio]

If you aren't comfortable editing your registry, you can probably uninstall steam -> run ccleaner to cleaup the registry -> then reinstall steam.

[Correction]

Bad news. When you remove Steam from the add/remove programs list, it takes all your installed games/files with it.

What I'm trying to say is the first few 'uninstall' attempts actually failed, despite what windows was telling me. All the folders and files were still there up until part 7 of my tale. I still have all the data in a renamed folder and was just wondering how to get that copied back to the fresh install of steam and have it work.