I filled my secondary 40 GB hard drive with poser stuff so I got a 250 GB fire wire drive and moved all of Poser4 and Poser5 over to the new drive. It actually worked to my surprise. The only problem was that Poser couldn't find the Geometry files for the pz3 scenes which I kept in a separate file on the fire wire drive. I decided to use CRPro to find and correct the references, but it didn't work. Actually things got worse and Poser then couldnnt find some of the geometries in the poser library character files. I think I've got CRPro pretty confused because it freezes up and can't complete the scan now.
I am thinking of deleting half my files and putting Poser back on the secondary drive again where it worked fine. I hate the thought of reinstalling a lot of files, Poser already uses too much of my life. Hogwarden has been great to work with me on this, but we're still struggling with the problem.
Has anyone done this successfully before.........if so,what is your secret?
I have a 1.7GHZ XP with 1GB Ram, 2 internal 40GB hard drives and a 250 GB firewire drive. I've done the defragging and all that stuff, what next?

Message edited on: 10/15/2004 23:56

I didn't move all of Poser 5, but just created new runtimes on an external Maxtor drive. I finally ended up leaving the geometries on the original drive....with the Poser 5 Program, after going through the same mess you are :) Geometries moved to another drive don't seem to work as well. However, you can "recreate" all the runtimes onto a different drive without a problem and that includes all the injection based figures as well. I also use CRPro. You have to be careful when using it in your geometries folder. There are a number of geometries of the same name that install with Poser and CRPro will sometims assign the wrong one. Always do a dry run before letting it change anything. Bottom line: it's best to leave the geometries where they are. My textures are also located on the Maxtor drive. I set CRPro to reference "full path" vs. relative path. Typically CRPro will not make mistakes with textures, but will point out duplicates.....so you need to know which texture is which. The CRPro data bases can get sort of messed up and sometimes you need to go into the hidden folder (Hogwarden should direct you on this one, since the location of that fold depends on you OS), remove all the old data base files and then restart CRPro. It will rebuild them and the "confusion" will be gone.

sandoppe, you are a genius! I Dragged my entire Poser 5 program back to my secondary hard drive. Then I moved Poser4/Runtime/Geometry back to the same drive but not inside Poser 5. (I have almost all of my stuff installed in the Poser4 runtime). When I click on any character in P3DO Explorer it tells where it will look for the geometry file. Everything works fine now. Even the PZ3s are opening fine. The only problem I see now is if I have to do a split install of new characters with the geometry on one drive and the textures on the firewire drive. Hmmmmm, I think I'll try to just put them all on the firewire drive and hope. Failing that I'll do the split install. Thanks again, Lance

First time I've ever been called a "genius"!! :) Glad it's working for you though. I know what you mean about the "split install", but I think you'll find that leaving the geometries in the poser directory on your main drive really does work the best. I've tried a couple of different approaches to having the geometry files on the Maxtor drive, but the objects load very slowly when you want to render, making the rendering process more tedious than normal. Of course.....the Maxtor is a USB 2.0/1.1drive and my computer USB is still at 1.1. Maybe your system can handle it better. I'd be interested in hearing back from you on how it worked. I'm seriously considering upgrading my computer to a faster USB card.

I moved poser to my new computer but renamed my drives the same as my old drive and that seemed to fix the problem. love esther

Good idea Esterau. It would not have worked in my case as I was adding an additional drive rather than moving to a new drive. I didn't want to rename the old drive that I was still using for other things. I now have 3 drives that I am working with. Working well for now though; with plenty of space on my 250 GB drive. I wouldn't recommend less than that for you poserholics that like to save your PZ3 scenes to revise later. Be sure to name the new drive something in the alphabet after the letter "J" as the newer computers with camera card drives come with drives already named from "A" through "I".

For Sandoppe, I didn't know you could upgrade to a USB 2.0. I have an additional USB 1.1 drive and it is too slow to do anything in Poser. Can't upgrade to USB 2 on my laptop without a lot of trouble and expense, the firewire is just as fast and I'm happy with that. I know it is pretty easy to add firewire to a desktop and not too expensive either.Heck, if you are a true addict and your computer is that old why not just buy a new computer? :)
Lance

Message edited on: 10/17/2004 22:50

Message edited on: 10/17/2004 22:54

I think you can add an additional USB 2 card....assuming you have the slots available....or a firewire card. A laptop is always a pain. Generally they never have extra slots for anything. I have four desktops....three of which are mine and the other is one I use on my job. I've thought about a new computer. This one is almost three years old. I typically get a new one about every two years.....which is why I have three desktops :) Not much market for old machines any more.