Why aren't my games working anymore?

[xboxconnect64]

I recently downgraged from Windows 8.1 to Windows 7 Ultimate both 64 bit. Before wiping everything off of my hard drive, i backed up my games to another hard drive to put them back on after getting 7. Now they never work correctly when I try to launch them with messages such as "missing .dll" or a glitched up menu. Any suggestions or help would be appreciated on my first post here!

 

[RoasterMen]

Because some games are meant to be reinstalled using it's Installer (Except for Some games in Steam).

 

[beret21]

Those dll files that it says are missing . search them on google download and copy em to ur windows "system32"(C:\Windows\System32 ) folder.
u are facing this because u are missing the softwares or the updates u had in windows 8.1. like " microsoft visual c++ redistributable 200x " where x is the version.

What can u do either
1> Update the windows fully
2> Download the softwares requried by each game ( Chek their README file for what the game needs )
3> keep downloading and placing those dll files in C:\Windows\System32

GOOD luck

 

[Gornot]

Those dll files that it says are missing . search them on google download and copy em to ur windows "system32"(C:\Windows\System32 ) folder.
u are facing this because u are missing the softwares or the updates u had in windows 8.1. like " microsoft visual c++ redistributable 200x " where x is the version.

What can u do either
1> Update the windows fully
2> Download the softwares requried by each game ( Chek their README file for what the game needs )
3> keep downloading and placing those dll files in C:\Windows\System32

GOOD luck

I have to very strongly disagree with the statement above. You should never, EVER just download random copies of system files from the internet. The most obvious reason is viruses or malware injected into the files, and second is system corruption that would render the system unbootable and useless.

Run cmd and do a "sfc /scannow" command (without the quotes), let it do the scan and restart.

If those are Steam games, verify integrity of game cache and try again.

If neither methods work, backup your saves and reinstall the games.

 

[xboxconnect64]

[/QUOTE]I have to very strongly disagree with the statement above. You should never, EVER just download random copies of system files from the internet. The most obvious reason is viruses or malware injected into the files, and second is system corruption that would render the system unbootable and useless.

Run cmd and do a "sfc /scannow" command (without the quotes), let it do the scan and restart.

If those are Steam games, verify integrity of game cache and try again.

If neither methods work, backup your saves and reinstall the games.[/QUOTE]

Is there any other solution without reinstalling my games? I have quite a big amount of them so it will be very lengthy to do that. I tried your console command and all it does is give me a list of other commands. Sorry if that sounded newbish XD.

 

[Gornot]

If it didn't do a scan, you didn't input it correctly.
Although I forgot to mention you needed to run cmd elevated (just right click on cmd and choose run as admin).

sfc /scannow

is the command, there is a space between sfc and /scannow

 

[Squid]

I recently downgraged from Windows 8.1 to Windows 7 Ultimate both 64 bit. Before wiping everything off of my hard drive, i backed up my games to another hard drive to put them back on after getting 7. Now they never work correctly when I try to launch them with messages such as "missing .dll" or a glitched up menu. Any suggestions or help would be appreciated on my first post here!

Hello - Are the games in question Steam based games? If so, you would need to put your saved "steamapps" folder in your newly installed Steam folder before you log in for the first time.

If these are not Steam games and you simply moved the games to a backup and then moved them back after installing 7, they more than likely will not work. You will need to re-install all of them as there are library files and registry entries that are missing.
Hopefully you saved the game saves as this is the most important part of the game and re-installing would be a lot less painful if you have the saves.

 

[smarteyeball]

If these are not Steam games and you simply moved the games to a backup and then moved them back after installing 7, they more than likely will not work. You will need to re-install all of them as there are library files and registry entries that are missing.

+1

Some games will definitely have to be re-installed to create the proper registry entries and links to the library files.

When you get the "missing.dll" errors, it's because the game does not know where to find the file - even if the file exists. Only by re-installing a game can you fix those errors.

For those games that can't be fixed by the other methods mentioned above, unfortunately that's the only way to fix these issues.