Staging folder and Deployment method

[swoopurboo]

I recently had a hard drive go bad and lost all of my game data (including mods). Now I am trying to reinstall all my mods. However every time I startup vortex I a pop up appears saying that the mod staging folder is missing (which was on my old drive), I click reinitialize staging folder and another pop up appears saying the the folder could not be created, and i have to got to and choose a valid directory (The staging folder could not be created. You have to go to settings->mods and change it to a valid directory before doing anything else or you will get further error messages.) When I go to settings and try to change a new staging folder, I get another error message saying "Failed to move directories" clicking more shows that Vortex tried to access my old folder but it doesn't exist.