My hard drive went south the other day.

Ouch. 

I bought a new drive and have to download all of the content the I bought here at Renderosity. It's actually about 90 gig worth of content so you can image how long this endeavor will take to download, unzip, open each file and place the contents into the correct folder. DAZ has the install manager (which I'm running right now, doing that side of things), and I was wondering if there's a quick way like that, a software maybe, that would take my downloaded Renderosity content and put it into the correct folders? I have DAZ and Poser 9.

Thanks for any help! 

It depends. If you're happy to have everything put into the library folders defined by the vendor, then Renderosity downloads have a consistent format and you should be able to just unzip everything to the same place. I use 7zip in command-line mode when I want to unzip a load of stuff all at once. I'm assuming you use Windows here.

If you're fussy about your library structure then there is no substitute for manual rearrangement after unzipping. Many freebies have non-standard folder structures and will also need manual intervention.

At the risk of sounding smug, may I recommend a backup before the next drive crash? ;-)

I agree with Englishbob in both comments here, firstly any automated process will put the content in the structure set by the zip files which is often not what you want.

Secondly I cannot stress just how important that having a back up is and that is from knowledge gained from working in a PC repair shop.   There are so many ways you can lose data and even if it can be recovered it is often costly and time consuming.  Hopefully you only lost runtimes that can be rebuilt and not any of your personal data such as your creations.  With the relative low cost of external USB drives and the like, backup is not only simple but cheap.

I wish you the best and hope you have a full working runtime soon.

You might want to check out Runtime DNA's website.  They have some great utilities for Poser by several software developers that are not expensive - in fact most are on sale right now...  I have purchased a few that use Poser's Scripts and they are great for installing/organizing your content as well as other things.

Hope this helps. 

I unzip everything to a temp folder, then i copy the good structure to the actual runtime, fix the bad stuff and copy the fixed stuff over. 

There was a utility at renderosity to automate install but I dont remember its name.

You did not say what the problem is with your hard drive.  If it is the case that it has become 'unbootable' because the operating system got corrupted  it might still work as a data disk.  In that case you might try bringing it up in an external usb drive such as 'Thermaltake'.  Similarly it might be worth attempting a recovery effort for the data and not worry about the operating system, but obviously after a major crash I would not trust a disk for the long term.

I once had a HD that crashed. I Ghosted the drive to a clean disk even though it was corrupt (never work on the original disk if the data are important - make sector by sector copies and work on them). It took me three tries in learning what settings would work, but I got the data back and then quickly transferred it to another HD. If I remember correctly it was exactly your scenario, but with my Poser 7 set-up.

I say 'Ghost' but it might have been from an equivalent program. 'Ghost' used to be the gold standard.

You might take a look at some of the utilities that come with UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD, which is actually a DVD). Once you get your new disk working make an ultimate boot cd for your computer. The way it works is you follow their instructions to get what is needed from your computer for booting and then add some of the 'free' utilities of your choice to your Ultimate Boot CD for your computer.

When that's done you can boot your computer without any hard disk in it at all. It will be slow, and you may have to call out to create a virtual disk made of your hardware's ram memory, but it should work.

Once you're running try some of the disk clone programs they offer (I vaguely remember a "true"-something or other disk clone) and try cloning your old HD to a clean one that is either new or good used.

Here's the link to the UBCD site:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

I should mention that UBCD is Free. It sort of creates its own operating environment that its utilities can live off of. It is also nice to have if you want to run programs and NOT have your hard disk invloved, in the case where you think there may be a virus that inserts itself into an operating system.

I am not an expert in software, so if I can do it, pretty much anyone can do it. It just takes time and patience.