Need some help moving my game + mods

[lachrymology987]

So, I semi-recently got into modding Skyrim, kind of learning as I go and really loving what you could turn this game into with some patience and other people's talents for creating these mods... a story to which I imagine many here on these forums can relate. Probably at least half of the hours I have banked on Steam were spent just tweaking and testing mods. Finally though I felt like I had my game in a pretty good state; it looked f'in gorgeous, had a bunch of incredible fan-created content added to it, and was pretty stable. However, the amount of disk space required not only by my game and mods but also to satisfy my addiction to cheap games on Steam eventually meant I needed more storage. So, I (perhaps foolishly) moved my entire Steam installation and games over to a portable drive. Pretty much every game I have on it now runs fine, except, of course, for Skyrim. Given the amount of time I have invested in getting my mods how I like them and the time I've spent actually playing the game, I'd really like to be able to get the game back to a playable state without having to go nuclear and obliterate/re-install the game. I haven't used the forums here much, but I decided that it'd probably be wise to appeal to the community to see if anyone has any advice for how I might be able to salvage my game.

 

It's clearly unplayable in its current state. The first time I tried to load after I moved it to my new E: drive from which I now run Steam, it killed my keyboard. Like, literally... the computer just stopped receiving any input from the keyboard once the game loaded, I had to shut it down by holding the power button. Keyboard still didn't work after restart, had to restart it again before it came back to life. I swear my mouse sometimes double-clicks on only a single-click sometimes ever since then too... Anyway, things kinda improved upon subsequent re-loads of the game but it's still unplayable. Extremely poor stability, and very funky stuff going on visually. Plus, my NMM and LOOT obviously won't populate since the files aren't where they expect them to be, and I couldn't seem to find the setting in either program to point them at the E: drive where those files are living now.

 

What I'm hoping I can do is move Skyrim - and ONLY Skyrim - back to my C: drive. Hopefully moving the game files and mods back to the C: drive and running them from there will save all that time getting it to look and play like I had it before, and will get NMM and LOOT back in the mix. So I suppose my first real question is this: Is it even possible to get Steam (which is running on my E:) drive, to run most games from the E: drive, but run Skyrim (and SKSE, I suppose) off of the C: drive? If so, are there any other Steam program files that need to be on the C: drive? As it sits right now, I do still have a Skyrim folder on the C: drive (and of course the entire file path from Program Files (x86) down to it), but it's empty, and it's literally the only thing in the C: Steam folder. All I suppose I was planning on doing was copying my Skyrim folder from my E:...steamapps/common to the identical (but empty) folder on on my C: drive, since that's all I did to move it in the first place. I was wondering, though: I don't see a folder for SKSE in my steamapps/common folder, is that something I would need to move? I guess I've never been 100% sure how it even worked, I've just known that I needed it to mod Skyrim. I never moved my save game files or in fact any game or settings files that weren't in my Steam folder (which may well be a factor in why the game runs like such s*** now) so hopefully if I can move things back then those dots will connect themselves without having to do anything else.

 

I suppose that's about it for my story for now. I'm pretty sure I've thought of other questions or concerns but this post is already long enough. Thanks to anyone who bothered to read it though and even more thanks in advance for anyone who has any advice for me. I hadn't played in a while (thanks mainly to Horizon: Zero Dawn) but I've been starting to get the itch to go back to Skyrim and would very much like to go back to the one I put all that time into already. I'm fully aware of and prepared for the possibility that I've f'ed my game beyond repair by doing what I've done already but I hope that that's not the case.

 

TL;DR: I'd like some advice on moving my heavily modded Skyrim BACK from portable storage to my C: drive, while still running Steam and all of its other games from the E: drive.