Well I officially got tired of the mess that was my runtime folder as well as the drive it was on and wiped out 100 gigs worth of hard drive space. I mean Fdisk, new partitions, the works. I had forgotten what it was like to have totally empty drives. Now that I got poser 4 & 5 installed again I need some help here. I did backup my runtime folder but am looking for the easiest way to pull the poser stuff in while rearranging it. I am not looking forward to renaming 3 gigs worth of folders by hand and copying it back over but at the moment I see no other route. Anyone got a trick to use for this, otherwise I am going to be at this all dadgum week.

No other way to put it: Yer Skrood! Good luck.

Correct Reference Pro might help. It won't do the rearranging (I don't think) but will fix any reference files you screw up in the process.

P3dO Explorer is good for seeing what you've got in your folders. Here's a radical idea - don't copy everything back. I did a rearrangement like this a while back, and apart from the basic stuff I only copied things back into the libraries when I realised I needed them. Needless to say, there's a lot of things that I never used more than once which are still in my backup.

While installing, I made several backups of my runtime folder: -a first one with the P5 stuff (that I didn't install as I have no use for it), then, after this copying and setting P5 to open a blank studio, I deleted all items except for ground.tif and camera.obj (P5 wants them at startup). -a second one with all the DAZ stuff I have. I think Daz does an incredible job, but their.exe files for installing are so slow...and offer no option to browse to where you want everything installed. -a third one with DAZ plus the things I bought at Renderosity (and a few on other sites, I confess) -a final fourth with the freestuff. Everything is neatly organized, and there were no problems with wrong files or references. Advantage: I have the original Runtime, and can, if I want to, go back to only DAZ, or everything except for freestuff etc etc. Indeed, more work at the start, but no nuisance later on. My two Eurocents.

Well I got most of my Daz stuff reinstalled to P5, that generally arranges itself pretty well. Tonight I plan to unzip all of the zip filesI have ammassed over the years to one drive and sort through them. It's going to take a while but it should be doable.

@Aeneas
The DAZ installers do allow you browse to a folder, you just need to click on Cancel or hit escape while it's searching.
The very newest ones only search if you ask them to.

Glad you mention this, but why is this so hidden? Having to check that oine wants to cancel installation to get to the option for browsing seems to me a bit bizarre.

Took me a while find this out, but as mentioned they've made searching optional which is much better.
I think most people (once they aquire large amounts of stuff) get into the habit of unpacking things into a temporary folder to check, fix, and organise.