I recently had to reformat my hard drive (Windows 7), but thankfully all my GOG games were on an external drive. Better still, Galaxy's library settings are easily carried over.

But there's one problem: the reformatted OS' registry doesn't mark any of the games as installed, and so if I try to use a patch, it thinks there's no game installed at all. I have to rely on Galaxy for my updating, and as you know, that's a disaster. I'm currently downloading the entirety of Wasteland 2 DC right now because Galaxy is incompetent and my computer doesn't know where to install a 45MB patch.

Is there a tool out there that could somehow "scan" my GOG folder and add its installs to the registry?

before you call some other people's work as incompetent (galaxy) you should think about yourself - from what you say you know nothing about registry and how it works. when i was 16 years old i wrote a program in Delphi which permanently scans the registry and shows recent changes to protect against possible viruses and stuff. some viruses rely on registry in order to run at boot-up

I doubt it and reformat as in reinstall OS,then as far as I know it's all got to be installed again.

Don't think it works like that. You should reinstall all games and add the save games from each game into where ever your save game location for each game is.Which if you formated pc it could be either on the external or lost because it saved on the your main drive.
And btw how many games do you want to have on your pc from gog.

Great, we have ciomalau and Tauto trying to help this poor guy.

He'd be better off asking a piece of celery.

Yeah, this is... not working. Forget I asked.

Stick around, you've been here long enough to know there are people willing and ABLE to help. I'm not one of them, but there are some around here. :P

I apologize for trying to assist and I'll try not to do it again. This is harassment,so REPORTED as such.

This is harassment,so REPORTED as such.

How do you report posts for things other than spam?

On topic, but unfortunately not something that would help the OP:
The registry is one of the biggest flaws of Windows. The best way to fix the registry, IMO, is to abandon it entirely and switch to a different OS that doesn't have one. (Linux, for example.)

Thanks micktiegs, this would definitely work in situations where you're trying to avoid a large patch download.

As it happens, I just came up with a preventative measure as well: using Galaxy's Verify/Repair will add the game to the registry even if there's nothing to fix. It only takes a few seconds even for large games. Unfortunately, it won't help if there is a patch, because it will just start downloading the files from the beginning, and as far as I can tell it adds to the registry at the end of the process, not the start.

If you've got a small number of games, my fix could be quickly done, but if you've got a large number you might want to focus on the games that are most likely/frustrating to update, like recent games and large ones.

Hurr durr I didn't backup my registry before reinstalling is all I read out of your post. Why is Galaxy incompetent when it's clearly you who is incompetent. Jesus, people these days