Or is it?

I recently had to replace my hard drives. I still have the originals and FS2004 is still installed on the original boot drive. I have copied a bunch of aircraft from the original boot drive, the Gauges folder, the Effects folder and one scenery from the Add-on Scenery folder. What I would like the egg-spurts herein to tell me please is: Can I copy the Gauges and Effects folder into the installation of FS2004 that is presently running now? What about pulling the running Gauges and Effects folders out and dropping-in the G-folder and E-folder from the previous hard-drive? I ask because over the course of the seventeen months between when I got the computer new until I needed the new drives, I put in megatonnes of airplanes and effects and gauges, et cetera. I had about 150 airplanes in the previous installation-- many of which never saw any daylight. I am going to make this installation much more slender, with maybe no more than thirty airplanes. I think putting in the airplanes, flopping-in the Gauges folder and the Effects folder will give me what I want. I know there will be an abundance of unused gauges and effects from airplanes that will not be in this smaller installation. Am I correct in thinking the presence of excess gauges and effects will not matter? Please answer soonest. Thanks to all...


Here's a new problem I have encountered since the new installation: I can't get into the config files of the airplanes. I click on the icon inside the model folder and I get that window that says Windows cannot open this file. I never had a problem doing this before the latest installation. I changed deployment times for flaps, added textures, raised tyres out of the tarmac, et cetera, so I know it can be done. Just can't do it now. I'm flummoxed. Do I need to check or uncheck something to get into the .cfg files for the airplanes? Thanks...

I agree with Doug's perspective. What I've done over the last year is migrate my burgeoning FS9 installation from my original PC (now defunct) to two further desktops and a laptop using esseintially the same method: fresh install of FS9 and then copy FS folders that I have got backed up on an auxiliary external drive: gauges, aircraft, effects, modules etc. Also installed a backed-up scenery.cfg which then reforms the scenery databases when you start FS9 up,  so you don't have to do it all manually. FS only calls specific gauges, effects etc. when you select a particular aircraft while modules form part of the sim boot-up. Never had an issue doing it this way.

Doing this, my installation is what I had before, plus more now, and I still keep all the addons and configurations backed up in case of issue.

Ditto with accessing the cfg files using Notepad - it's pretty much the easiest way.