WoW Technical Help

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Jonkga
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WoW Technical Help

Post by Jonkga »

OK, my father is having some problems. He is trying to play WoW, but was getting an error saying he didn't have the room for the patch.

He's using an iMac, and an external drive. He can't seem to get WoW to patch to the external drive.

Ken talked me through some stuff the other night, and he's called Blizzard support directly, but so far he still can't make it happen.

Any ideas about what I should be asking him to look at, what he needs to check, or anything that may help would be welcomed input. Thanks guys.
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EvilGenius
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Re: WoW Technical Help

Post by EvilGenius »

Mmmmmm. Beyond getting a Windows machine with a large enough hard drive, I don't have much advice.

And this is not tongue-in-cheek advice either. If the free space on his hard drive is very low and he's already deleted non-critical files and he still doesn't have room on the hard drive for the patch ..... he needs to get a bigger hard drive.

If he has a Windows machine, you can simply drop in a second hard drive (if there is space in the box), expand the C drive to use both disks and viola! Much much more space.

Cant really do that with Macs, from what I understand.
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erilar
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Re: WoW Technical Help

Post by erilar »

Edit: Bob is right - an iMac is a sealed all-in-one unit, and replacing a hard drive is not trivial like w/ a PC. Apple *would* do it for him for a fee though, I bet. There is a brick-and-mortar Apple store in "Crossgates" in Albany: http://www.apple.com/retail/crossgates/

Using an external hard drive to house a game like WoW will also probably result in a negative impact on performance. The transfer rate via USB 2.0 is decent, but not anywhere as fast as a dedicated, internal hard drive. He may end up pretty unsatisfied with the results even if he does get it to work. :(


Regarding putting WoW on the external drive, though:

If I understand correctly, in Mac OS the whole program is housed inside a container. Unlike a program installed on Windows, there is no junk getting installed to the system directory or registry. The program is totally self-contained. You only see one icon/program, but there's actually a whole bunch of separate programs and files housed in there.

So, I *think* the application can be moved to wherever you want. If he moves the main WoW folder from the Applications directory on his internal drive and out to the external drive, I *think* it should work.

If it doesn't, or if he suspects he already garbled something up by trying to move it, maybe he could do a fresh install directly onto the external drive?
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Jonkga
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Re: WoW Technical Help

Post by Jonkga »

My mistake for not being clear enough.

He's got one of the old imacs, and yeah, right now, WoW is saying there isn't enough space there to house WoW and the new patch. However, he moved everything to the external drive, which has something like 360+ megs available to house the 2 meg patch, but something seems to be keeping WoW from directing the patch to the external drive.

After a few fruitless calls to Blizzard (not that they didn't help, just that the help didn't work), he is going the "complete uninstall, then reisnstall on the external drive" route. I can't see how this won't fix it, but we shall see.
"Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion."
-- "Directive" by Robert Frost
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