How to recover Vortex mods from W10 crash?

[Sixfins]

Moved from other forum.

 

My computer crashed badly and I had to reinstall W10 from scratch. My Steam apps (Fallout 4, Skyrim SE) and Vortex mods were on an external SSD (D: drive) and are not affected.

I reinstalled Vortex and pointed it to the Vortex mods on the D-drive, hoping that would work. But it told me that the Vortex mods folder needed to be empty.

I then moved the mods to another folder, pointed Vortex to the Vortex mods folder on the D: drive, closed it, moved the mods back into the Vortex mods folder and started Vortex again. The mods showed up, disabled. When I then tried to enable them it informed me that those mods originated from another instance of Vortex and that it wanted to purge them.

I had hundreds of mods running, reinstalling them one by one from Nexus would be a lot of work.

Is there a way to make Vortex absorb all the mods already present on my D: drive, so I don't have to reinstall them?

[Tannin42]

What you have to consider is this: The mods themselves are in your staging folder, but those are just the extracted mods the way the mod authors publish them.

Everything Vortex knew about these mods and your profiles (which say which mods were enabled) were all stored in your c:\users\<username>\appdata\roaming\Vortex directory which you deleted when you reinstalled windows.

Now if you have a backup of your appdata you should restore it.

If not, you reaaaaally should start backing it up in the future if you want to prevent issues like this in the future.

 

Otherwise there is no way around what you did: reset the staging folder the way you described.

Then, if you were running Vortex 1.2, go to the mods screen and use the "Reset to manifest" button in the toolbar. This should enable the mods you had enabled before. If you were using an older version of Vortex you have to manually enable the mods you were using.

Then when it tells you about purging the other instance, do it. As far as Vortex is concerned your previous Vortex installation _is_ another instance and it has to clean out everything that old instance did to cleanly deploy from the "new" instance.

 

After this the mods and Vortex functionality should work again, however there is still a lot of stuff gone, of the top of my head: all other profiles, the ones you weren't actively playing, are gone. All your custom rules (mod and plugin "load after" rules). Your game ini settings and savegames are gone (unless you did backup&restore your documents directory). Also Vortex may not know which mod was installed from which archive and it doesn't know the versions of the mods you have installed so update checks won't work.

 

The latter you may be able to fix: Press ctrl+a to select all the mods in the mod list, then click "Guess ID" in the white bar at the bottom. Vortex will try to guess the mod ids and then fill in as much information as possible automatically. It may make mistakes but 99% of the mods should be correctly identified.

You can also use the extension "Archive binding fix" to try and repair the associations between mods and the corresponding archives but usually if Vortex can do that it should have done it automatically.

[Sixfins]

Thanks Tannin42!

 

I did have my saves fortunately, they came back via Steam Cloud syncing.

 

I did what you described and Vortex seems to be at peace with the mods now. I started FO4 via FO4 Script Extender, but FO4 then lists all the mods and mentions that this content no longer is present.

What is still wrong?

 

 

A bit of background on the lack of backup:

I run W10 on an iMac under a Boot Camp partition, have done so for years, worked just fine.

Then one morning the whole iMac was totally dead, would not even turn on. Apple certified premium service provider could not find any hardware problem and had to do a total reinstall of MacOS. My Time Machine backup brought back everything on that side, so no problem there.

But as a consequence I had to create a new Boot Camp partition and reinstall W10. I never made a full W10 backup because I doubted that I could reinstall a full W10 backup under Boot Camp.

As for backing up specific files and apps: I had considered that but I had no idea which files and folders I would need to back-up.

[Tannin42]

Did Vortex prompt you to deploy? did you?

In your fallout 4 data folder, can you see the mods?

On the Vortex plugins panel, are the plugins listed? and enabled?

[Sixfins]

• Deploying takes a few seconds for each app and shows a blue progress bar. I don't remember seeing that. They just were shown as enabled.
• In Steam/steamapps/common/Fallout4/Data I can see what seem to be all the mods. A few mods are of the .esp file type. But the vast majority has the extension .esp.vortex_lnk or .ba2.vortex_lnk.
• I can see a limited number of plugins in Vortex, some enabled, some disabled. That seems to be more or less similar to the situation before the crash.

Would it help if within Vortex I reinstall all the mods via Ctrl-A?

[Tannin42]

oh boy, the vortex_lnk files indicate you were using the (experimental) move deployment method.

That's not good, the vortex_lnk files are dummies with no actual contents. If that's all that's left of the mods you probably won't get around reinstalling them. :(

[Sixfins]

Hey Tannin42

 

Thanks for your response!

 

I found that out and more the hard way, as I ran into a series of other problems with both FO4 and Syrim SE. I couldn't get them running, even when I disabled all mods and started a brand new game. Even the FO4 intro slowed to a crawl, erratic mouse behaviour, SKSE64 telling me it could not find Skyrim SE, which resided in the same folder, etc, etc,

I concluded it is better to delete all mods, Vortex, FO4, Skyrim SE, the Steam app and a series of folders that were left behind on my D: drive by both Vortex and Steam.

I will reinstall everything from scratch and see what happens then.

 

BUT... Can you tell me which folders I will need to backup in order to avoid this in the future?

And will that be enough, will restoring such a partial backup run into trouble with things like the dreaded Windows Registry?

[HadToRegister]

Hey Tannin42

 

Thanks for your response!

 

I found that out and more the hard way, as I ran into a series of other problems with both FO4 and Syrim SE. I couldn't get them running, even when I disabled all mods and started a brand new game. Even the FO4 intro slowed to a crawl, erratic mouse behaviour, SKSE64 telling me it could not find Skyrim SE, which resided in the same folder, etc, etc,

I concluded it is better to delete all mods, Vortex, FO4, Skyrim SE, the Steam app and a series of folders that were left behind on my D: drive by both Vortex and Steam.

I will reinstall everything from scratch and see what happens then.

 

BUT... Can you tell me which folders I will need to backup in order to avoid this in the future?

And will that be enough, will restoring such a partial backup run into trouble with things like the dreaded Windows Registry?

 

 

C:\users\<YOUR NAME>\appdata\roaming\vortex

 

C:\users\<YOUR NAME\documents\ (which will include MY GAMES, which covers your savegames, ini files etc.)

 

If you have the space and the time, just backup the entire appdata folder, OR the entire Users directory if you want to be on the safe side