Vortex detects hardware or disk is defective

[Carskeycoc]

Yeah so when i download or switch games for vortex this message pops up not like in vortex but a windows form and says that accessing a mod that i downloaded failed with an error that indicates a hardware problem or my disk is defective. I ruled both out already because i can mod gta v on epic games on the same drive as the one i downloaded fallout 4. Since vortex literally scans my folder thing like every time i download a mod or activate games or delete anything it checks for errors or something. Another thing is that i cannot delete the mod or else the same message pops up.

[Tannin42]

Vortex doesn't check your hard disk itself, it just forwards errors that your operating system produces as Vortex tries to do its work.

[BeowulfSchmidt]

I ruled both out already because i can mod gta v on epic games on the same drive as the one i downloaded fallout 4.

Outside of utilities purpose built to detect and/or fix disk (and âfixâ usually means âmark those sectors as bad so the operating system doesnât use them), almost no application actually tests your disk. They, as tannin points out, just parrot the operating systemâs message back to you after trying something.

 

You canât rule out a disk going bad just because other files On that disk are ok. Hard drives often donât crap out completely, they often go bad a few, or many, sectors at a time. Or something happened to those specific bad sectors (like jarring the computer or something), and the rest of the drive will still be fine.

 

Open up a command shell and run âchkdiskâ or maybe âchkdskâ. Itâs been a while, I donât remember which. If it reports bad sectors, rerun with the /f flag. Youâll need to reboot your machine at that point so the program can run at startup before Windows starts.

 

It will mark any bad sectors as bad so the OS wonât try to write to them. Be prepared for files that occupy those bad sectors to be inaccessible afterwards.

[Tannin42]

Without seeing the proper error message there are other things we can't rule out, for example

A file-system error. That is: There is no hardware defect but the index of files on your disk is damaged, this could happen due to a power outage for example or if your system crashed with a blue screen due to a driver error. chkdsk, like BeowulfSchmidt said would be able to help with this.

Or drivers managing virtual drives could generate errors that sound like hardware defect. E.g. if you use software for on-the-fly disk encryption or disk compression, if that software is having any kind of trouble while Vortex is trying to access the encrypted/compressed drive, the error message could sound like a hardware error.

This affects for example all windows store applications (stuff like Halo Master Chief Collection), because they are all distributed as encrypted archive and then the game directory you see is just a virtual view on that encrypted archive. I've seen cases where, after sending the system to sleep for example, those virtual directories didn't work properly any more until windows was rebooted.

Another common offender (again microsoft) is onedrive, where it will generate filesystem errors when it can't synchronize the directory content with the cloud (due to network problems or something).

 

With all of these things however, Vortex can really not do anything about it apart from relaying what the system said and hope that it's somehow enough information for you to get an idea what the problem is. Vortex can't fix these problems nor can it get more information about the issue than what the OS reported.