Steam and pre-existing installations

So I dug out my Half-Life GOTY edition and re-installed it today.
After doing so I remebered that to update it now you have to install Steam so off I went to do so.

ONce it was installed it asked me for the CD-Keys of any games I had so I puched in my CD-Key and it was happy and showed me the list of games/mods I can play. THen it did it's whole "copying existing files" thing from c:\games\halflife into c:\steam etc.

My question is - can I uninstall the old halflife directory and get some space back or does Steam require that those local files stay present?

Thanks,
F

I'm 99% sure that you can delete the old Half-Life installation.

Try renaming your old HL directory and then running it from within Steam. If all is well then you can proceed with the uninstall.

Don't think that any existing savegames will transfer over to Steam though.