Running Sims 3 From External Hard Drive

[HelloThere1221]

My mac doesn’t have enough storage to run the game so I’ve been trying to move my Electronic Arts folder to the external drive. Whenever I run it, however, it just makes a new electronic arts folder.

I tried following “Running your Sims 4 from an external hard drive” tutorial by bluebellflora but whenever I type the command into ternminal it says “permission denied”.

Any ways to fix this?

[puzzlezaddict]

@HelloThere1221  Which command are you running that denies permission?  If there's an existing Electronic Arts folder on the drive, you wouldn't be able to move the new Electronic Arts folder to the same location, and if there's already an Electronic Arts folder in Documents on your hard drive, you wouldn't be able to create a symbolic link with the same name in the same location.  In either case, rename the folder that's in the way and try again.

If that's not the issue, please list the command you're running, and let me know what your external hard drive is called as well.

[HelloThere1221]

There is no electronic arts folder in the hard drive.

Command I’m using:

mv ~/Documents/Electronic\ Arts /Volumes/Seagate\ Bat/

[puzzlezaddict]

@HelloThere1221  Can you just move the Electronic Arts folder manually?  It will leave a copy on your internal drive, which you'll then need to move elsewhere.  (Don't delete it until you know the process worked.)  But then you can move on to creating the symlink without worrying about the error.

If that doesn't help, please let me know what format the external drive has.  You can see it in Disk Utility.

[HelloThere1221]

I manually moved it to the hard drive and ran the command In ~s /Volumes/Seagate\ Bac/Electronic\ Arts ~/Documents/ and the command worked but when I launched sims 3 it gave a “Problem Report”.

The format is ExFAT

[puzzlezaddict]

@HelloThere1221  The symbol in ln -s is a hyphen.  If changing it doesn't work, have you tried using a different format?  Mac OS Extended (Journaled) worked for me.  I'm not actually sure whether exFAT supports partitioning, but if you had other content on the external drive and didn't want to have to format the whole thing, you could try partitioning in Disk Utility and see whether it works.

[HelloThere1221]

I tried re-entering the script with the - instead of ~ and it stayed the same. I can’t partition the hard drive either

[Bluebellflora]

@HelloThere1221

What is the name of your hard drive? Is it Seagate Bat? Or Bat? Could you post a screenshot of it as showing in your Finder sidebar when mounted?

[HelloThere1221]

It's called Seagate Bat

[Bluebellflora]

@HelloThere1221 

It's Seagate Bac, not Bat.

You need the drive to be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled)  (I do make this really clear in the instructions )

Whilst formatting maybe it would be a good idea to name it with just one word, not two. I found it easier.