Vortex and Fallout 4 are not "talking" to each other

[jcweinstock01]

My modded games (Fallout 4, New Vegas, Skyrim) are all purchased on Steam and are on an external SSD. I recently had some work done on my computer, which required me to remove the SSD. Before I removed the SSD it was called (E:). For whatever reason, when I got my computer back and plugged the SSD back in, the name changed from (E:) to (D:). As far as I can tell, this is where the problems began. This seems to be a problem for all three games, but I'm specifically referring to Fallout 4 from here on. Since the name of the hard drive changed, the pathways for Vortex were no longer accurate. Working on it over the past few days, I've made a new staging folder for the mods to see if that would help it, and I triple checked each of the pathways to make sure they were going to the right folders. As it stands, both the mod staging folder and game folder are on the same external drive, both folders have a vortex_staging_folder file in them (I don't know if they're supposed to, they just happened to have them). When I open the game through F4SE, it does not recognize that the mods are installed. I can't figure out why Fallout 4 and the mod folder aren't reading each other. Vortex doesn't seem to know anything is wrong; it is deploying mods with no issue, and I'm getting no error messages. Any help would be appreciated. The only things I can think of doing to fix it that I haven't done are uninstalling and reinstalling Fallout 4, or having Vortex un-manage and re-manage Fallout 4.

[ZoldFrog]

Greetings & sorry that you're having trouble. A couple of places for you to check and, if necessary, correct.

 

Note that if you do need to move any locations (staging, downloads, etc) you should make the change in Vortex and let Vortex move the files. 

1. Click Games from the left column of Vortex and then the vertical ellipses at the top right corner of FO4 (can do for any other installed game as well). Ensure that the path displayed is to the root folder of the game (verify drive name change). If not, click Manually Set Location and correct the path. 
2. Re-verify the staging folder path is correct and is on the same drive (it sounds like yours is but verify just to be sure). Staging folder is Settings -> Mods. 
3. From the Dashboard, click the vertical ellipses to the right of F4SE (or NVSE, SKSE, etc) and choose "Edit". The "Target" line should point to the loader.exe (F4SE_Loader.exe for example). The "Start In" line should point to the root folder of the game. Yours should look something like: (the Target line) d:\steam\steamapps\common\Fallout 4\f4se_loader.exe and d;\steam\steamapps\common\Fallout 4 (the Start In line). Click "Save". 
4. Click the vertical ellipses to the right of F4SE again and make sure that it is set as Primary. 

I suspect that based on your post, 3 & 4 will be your solution. 

Good luck!

[jcweinstock01]

Unfortunately, all of those were correctly set. Good first steps for anyone with this problem, but it seems I had those bases covered. 

[ZoldFrog]

Is the deployment method set to hardlink? 

[jcweinstock01]

It is set to Move Deployment (Experimental), but I don't have any other options to change it.

[ZoldFrog]

29 minutes ago, jcweinstock01 said:

It is set to Move Deployment (Experimental), but I don't have any other options to change it.

Sorry, I thought that you had used this drive previously and made an assumption based on this. The drive needs to be NTFS and I suspect that yours is formatted differently, likely exFAT. You'll either need to use another drive or reformat the one you're trying to use now 

 

[jcweinstock01]

I have been using this drive for over a year. Never experienced any issue with the formatting. Didn't even know there could be an issue caused by the format. Thanks for your help with diagnosis.

[jcweinstock01]

By the way, I moved my game and mod staging folders over to my main hard drive to test the Hardlink deployment theory. It did not fix the problem even when moved onto my internal drive.