Moved Steam and Everything Broke

[Deathwolf20]

As it says in the title, I was running out of space on my C drive and decided to move Steam to my external hard drive. I figured that since pretty much all my games were already there it wouldn't be much of an issue. And that was true - the games still work fine. But Vortex no longer does.

I tried to run Stardew Valley a few days ago and noticed that SMAPI didn't start up like its supposed to, which was my first tip that the mods weren't working. I fiddled with some things, tried to change the staging folder (to ensure it was in the D drive), but it was when I purged and then deployed the mods again that I got a proper error message. Well, three error messages. The first is that the mods are 'redundant' - and then lists all eight or so mods I had. Then it says deployment failed - currently that's at 49 files failed, but that's because I uninstalled everything but SMAPI. And finally, "Symlinks not Supported"

So far, I've purged/deployed all mods, I've uninstalled all mods and removed them entirely (leaving me with just SMAPI to toy with), and I've uninstalled Vortex, then reinstalled it on the same drive that Steam and all the games are on now. I have no idea how to get Vortex to talk with Steam again, so I'd really appreciate some advice here.

Thanks ahead of time!

[Pickysaurus]

Make sure your new drive is NTFS formatted. 

Then ensure your staging folder is on the same drive as the game in Settings -> Mods -> Mod Staging Folder. 

If you dragged and dropped your entire Steam library to a new drive that would likely cause a lot of problems. Try verifying the games in Steam to update their new paths. 

[Deathwolf20]

All my Steam games have been on the external drive (my D drive) for years now. I moved Steam itself to the D Drive - the executable and the other core files. Which is why I'm annoyed that it isn't working anymore - the games and vortex were in the exact same places they've always been. I can still open games through Vortex, the mods just refuse to deploy now. Just to be safe, I did verify integrity and that changed nothing.

Anyway, I checked the D drive and you are correct - it is currently exFAT formatted, so it'll need to be reformatted to NTFS. I'm told this will clear the drive entirely? Which means I'll need to order a flashdrive to store the vital files and uninstall steam and vortex. I'll let you know in a week or so once I've got the flash drive and done all the reformatting, un- and re- installing, etc etc. Thanks for the help and I'll be back later to update on my situation.

[Deathwolf20]

Okay, I'm back! The flash drive got lost in the mail so I was set back a little, but I got the important stuff off the D drive. Then I reformatted to NTFS. I just finished reinstalling Steam, Stardew, Vortex, and finally SMAPI to test. Lo and behold, the mods are working again! Thank you for your help, I'm so so glad to have my mods back