Can you run FFXI from an external hard drive?Follow

Can't see why not, but your load times would suffer.

As the others have mentioned, yes you can... but there are a couple of caveats.

It does need to be installed on the computer you are playing on, so that the registry settings can be put in place. You can install POL and FFXI to any drive that is connected to your computer.

However, you can not easily install it on one drive, then attach that drive to a computer that has never had FFXI installed and play it.

-Ten

I'm going to suggest something that people might want to try if they'd be planning on using a portable hard drive on more than one machine. It may not be entirely neccesary to run the full installation on every machine you wanted to run FFXI on.

I haven't tried this personally but I'd be interested to hear if anyone has tried this or is willing to be a guinea pig. I'd really like to know if people try or have tried this in the past.

Once you've installed onto an external drive on one computer you could try exporting the necessary registry data onto the external drive where you can then load the information to any computer and then possibly run the game without having to run the entire installer.

***WARNING: DO NOT USE REGEDIT UNLESS YOU ARE A CONFIDENT COMPUTER USER. I WILL NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR ACTIONS IF YOU DECIDE TO TRY THIS AND YOU ***** UP YOUR MACHINE. I HIGHLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO BACKUP YOUR REGISTRY BEFORE YOU TRY ANYTHING.***

To Backup:
-Go to your start menu
-Left click on "Run"
-Type "regedit" into the box and press enter
-Go to the file menu, click on export
-Under the "Export Range" setting select "All"
-Pick a location and type filename, save the backup.

To Restore:
-Simple double click on the file and accept.
or
-In regedit click on the file menu then "import"
-Navigate to the file you backed up
-Double click on it to restore

To export the Playonline settings:
-On the left hand side under "My computer" navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/PLAYONLINE(XX)" where "(XX)" is your region code. PLAYONLINEEU for EU clients for example.
-Right click on "Playonline", select "Export"
-Under the "Export Range" setting select "Selected Branch"
-Pick a location and type filename, save the backup.

To import these settings on another PC:
-Simple double click on the file and accept.
or
-In regedit click on the file menu then "import"
-Navigate to the file you backed up
-Double click on it to restore

The only problem that people might come across is that the drive letters on the different PC's for the external drive might differ so you may need to either;
a) change the drive letter of the external drive from the disk management console in the windows system manager
b) change the values which contain the location of the install in regedit. I think most if not all are under the "InstallFolder" branch in the "Playonline" folder.

You would want to make sure that both of the systems supported the options that you've set in your FFXI config too. So, for example, no resolutions that are beyond the range of either monitor.

Gee thanks for the support >.> I know where to come for scintillating technical discussion now without being talked down to.

Maybe between us we've helped a couple of people figure it out, and I'd be happy if I'd helped somebody. Maybe I've added nothing to what you knew but other people might find it useful. A detailed knowledge of how to play with your registry is something that you're going to need before you try to get FFXI working off a portable drive without having to re-install. And hey, only one of us has posted instructions beyond "you'll need to play with your registry" so far.

Just running a quick search in the POL folder there's 27 *.dll files which might possibly need to be registered by what you've said. There is no *.ocx files in the POL folder so you can rule that out. The simplest way to test your theory about registering the DLL's is simply to put them all into the *.bat file you were describing.

Here's a link to a process explorer for people
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx
, you'd need to check which DLL's are running in both POL and when you have FFXI loaded up, this means the use of a windower so you can Alt-Tab and check which *.Dll's are being run. If you don't want to use a windower you can just register all the DLL's in the *.bat file you make.

Edited, Jan 2nd 2007 4:12pm by blowfin

I had little problems with running ffxi from my external hd but the loadingtimes were a bit longer from my external hd so i moved it again to the disk in my pc.
Had no connection issues or installing issues only loading things like jeuno ah and other places like whitegate were really long and causing me to be a bit laggy.

But my HD is like 1.5 year old so maybe if you just bought one not to long ago it might be better.