How to install Steam on a LAN drive

[botmeister]

For those who run LAN servers and want Steam to load off a LAN drive for technical reasons, do the following (Windows instructions only, but you can probably do the same thing with Linux):

Running Steam from a LAn gives you several advantages:

1. Won't eat up you local disk space
2. You can run the same installation from multiple machines without having to install the damn thing on each computer
3. You can reformat a machine, and easily get steam back without doing a full installation.

etc

NOTE: AFAIK this is legal, but I am not a lawyer, at least I can't find anything that says in no uncertain terms that it is not legal. If you try and install Steam onto a LAN drive it won't let you. The error message is something like this "Installation requirement. Steam must be installed on a valid hard drive. Floppy drives, Network Drives and CD-ROM drives are not permitted. Please direct Steam to a valid direction" I am assuming this is for technical reasons(?), but if you think it is a licensing restriction, then you should not do it. I did read through the license agreement and there's no mention of not allowing a network drive installation.

On a system with two local hard drives you'll have drives C and D. If you map your LAN drive, you'll end up with drive E. The nice thing about Windows is you can remap and drive to any letter that's available, so let's say you first map local drive D as Drive E, then we map the LAN drive as drive F.

Start
C: Local drive (never remap this one!)
D: Local Drive
E: LAN drive

After remapping
C: Local drive (never remap this one!)
E: Local Drive (formerly D)
F: LAN drive (formerly E)

Note: At this point DO NOT install any games, ONLY install Steam.

Next, we install Steam (but no games) onto local drive E. After the install completes, you first make sure Steam is shut down, then remap local drive E back to D, and LAN drive F back to E

After remapping
C: Local drive (never remap this one!)
D: Local Drive (formerly E)
E: LAN drive (formerly F)

Now copy (or move) the entire contents of the Steam installation from drive D onto LAN drive E, be sure to preserve the folders so the configuration does not change.

Once the copy (or move) is complete you can fire up Steam directly from the LAN drive, and from there you can safely install the games and run them.

Simple as pie