Hey folks,

I just got back my PC with it's new hard drive and I'm trying to reinstall some of my games and I've come to a roadblock with Borderlands GoTY ed.

I reinstalled Steam and all my purchased games are showing up. I was able to reinsert my disk for Skyrim and redownloaded the game off the disk and it's working just fine with Steam.

I tried the same thing with my Borderlands GotY disk and while I can get the game back onto my hard drive, it's not automatically syncing back up with Steam.
I tried activating my BL's product key and it comes back and says that that key has already been activated which indeed it has.

My question is, how do I get my disk based game to play nice with Steam again? Steam is giving me the option to install the game right from Steam but I was hoping to avoid eating up my monthly allotment of gigs by using my physical copy of BL's and using the disk again.

Thoughts?

I think it might just simply be easier to re-download it.... You should easily be able to install the game from the disk itself and it just installs to steam...

If the data is in the same location simply hit the download in steam, it will do a discovery of the existing files and pull down anything missing

Yeah if you can collect the games from your old harddrive and put it in it's correct place in the steam directory, steam will scan the files and decide it's already downloaded when you choose to install it. This worked for the 50+ steam games I had installed when reinstalling windows recently. The only game that wouldn't play nice is Pillars of Eternity which decided it wanted to redownload everything...

Thanks guys for getting back to me.

Right now I'm still trying to get it to work with Borderlands GotY.

I'm trying this method, but for some reason it's not working:

Using Steam launch options to install retail games from disc

Log in to Steam and click on Library.

Right-click on the game, select Delete local content, and confirm.

Insert the first disc into your computer.

Close Steam (Steam > Exit).

Press Windows Key + R to open Run

In the Run window type:

"C:\Program Files\Steam\Steam.exe" -install E:

Replace E: with the CD/DVD drive you are installing from if is not correct.

Replace C:\Program Files\Steam if your Steam installation is not in the default location.

Press OK. Steam will launch and ask you to sign in if you do not have your password saved. Your installation should continue from the disc.

VAC, I used the disc to install it a few years ago, but now I wanna reinstall it using the disc I just can't get it to work.

Korwin, "hit the download in Steam", do you mean the install button in the Steam app...which I've tried and it wants to download over the internet and not from the disc in the D drive, or are you talking about something else?

Robb, should I upload BLs off the disc onto my hard drive and then somehow move the entire file into Steam?

Try opening a commandline window in the steam directory by going to the steam directory in windows explorer and type "cmd" in the adress bar.

That will open a commandline window at the current location. Then just type in steam.exe -install followed by the correct drive letter.

If it doesn't work, it should at least give you some feedback about why/how it's failing.