Need assistance transferring Vortex mods to different drive and deploying them

[FrozenWolf82]

Hi, I'm in need of assistance to transfer my mod and vortex files successfully to my new Skyrim folder location on my secondary drive.
Currently, the mod files exist in the SSE folder, but aren't picked up by LOOT and aren't deployable through vortex. If anyone has advice to fix these issues, please inform me.
Do I have to reinstall Vortex and Loot? What do I need to do to resolve these issues?

(Respective attached images descriptions)
-Loot not detecting any mods, period.
-Error messages of relevance that need to be resolved on Vortex: (The others just pertain to conflicts which I know how to resolve)



EDIT: ISSUE RESOLVED

Thread of how to resolve issue if you transfer Skyrim with Vortex already active while also using LOOT and not being able to deploy or edit mod load order.
-Step 1, don't panic and touch Vortex roaming data and program files.
-Step 2, Uninstall and reinstall Skyrim SE to a clean slate (you'll have to reinstall SKSE and any ENB you have, later).
-Step 3, Clean slate LOOT and reinstall.
-Step 4, Go to settings, mods and then do the thing that Vulcan and RMM have said and HadToRegister explains very helpfully visually on Page 2 of this thread.
-Step 5, Problem should get resolved and you should only have regular messages and one message telling you to install SKSE.

(IMPORTANT NOTE: you do not need to uninstall any mods or Vortex itself.)

If this doesn't resolve your issue you may need to make your own thread asking for more specific help.

Thank you everyone for your help, I hope you have a wonderful rest of the year.

[rmm200]

It does not matter where your downloads folder is. Just tell Vortex where to find it.

You are using hard links, so the mod staging folder has to be on the same drive as the game. Tell Vortex where to put it, and Vortex will move it. NOT in the game folder.

Do not move your game folder before doing a Purge in Vortex. Windows Move will seriously screw up your game folder. If you already did, delete your game and reinstall.

After the moves, issuing Deploy in Vortex should be all you need.

[VulcanTourist]

It does not matter where your downloads folder is. Just tell Vortex where to find it.

You are using hard links, so the mod staging folder has to be on the same drive as the game. Tell Vortex where to put it, and Vortex will move it. NOT in the game folder.

Do not move your game folder before doing a Purge in Vortex. Windows Move will seriously screw up your game folder. If you already did, delete your game and reinstall.

After the moves, issuing Deploy in Vortex should be all you need.

To add some detail to this, you can specify the locations of the staging and download folders in Settings | Mods and Settings | Download. As I said at Reddit and @rmm200 concurs, hardlinks require that the staging folder be on the same drive/volume as the game itself; that is a limitation of hardlinks, which are a filesystem feature, not implemented by Vortex. Vortex merely uses them to good advantage.

 

I don't know if it will help or confuse, but hardlinks are essentially extra pointers to the same file content that has already been created and stored in the Vortex staging folder. A hardlink is merely an extra pointer to the same data without copying it. When Vortex "Deploys", it's creating these hardlink pointers to the same data of the same files already stored in the Vortex staging folder. Technically the very first copy of a file is also a hardlink: the pointer and the data it points to are kept separate, which is why you can have endless pointers to the same file data. You can delete hardlinks without deleting the file data: the file data is never deleted as long as at least one pointer to it remains. Once that last hardlink is deleted, so is the data that it points to. The hardlinks occupy no file space themselves.

 

TMI?

 

From what you described earlier, I suspect you did move the game before you purged, which as @rmm200 said forces Windows to actually MAKE A COPY of the hardlinked files during the transfer, which then disconnects Vortex from all of them because they're NEW FILES and no longer the hardlinks that Vortex created in the first place. You could probably try to perform surgery to remove all the duplicated clutter, but it would require experience you probably don't yet have and we can't guide you through it. The only reasonable course, if that is what happened, is to uninstall the game, DELETE the remaining game folder, and then reinstall. That is the most practical way of restoring the game to its default state.

 

After that, when the game is restored to baseline and you've made sure the Vortex downloads and staging folders are correctly specified for the new situation, then using Deploy again will recreate those hardlinks that got transformed into copies, and then you should hopefully be back to where you started.

 

Also, as I said a while ago tonight, don't use a separate install of LOOT outside of Vortex! It's a conflict of effort, since Vortex already includes LOOT internally. It's what the Plugins tab is all about: that is LOOT under the hood.

[rmm200]

Robo-bot approves of Vulcan's post. Good to see you on board.

[FrozenWolf82]

Before I uninstall Skyrim and reinstall it, is there any chance I can copy my save data and move it into a separate folder?

[VulcanTourist]

Before I uninstall Skyrim and reinstall it, is there any chance I can copy my save data and move it into a separate folder?

Mods | Open... | Open Game Settings Folder will take you there... but I don't think you need to do it; uninstalling the game should not affect any of what is stored there. That is considered "user data" and not part of the game per se.

 

You can still 7-Zip or copy that entire folder structure if you want to be cautious.

 

[rmm200]

Remember your save games (and log files, etc.) go in Documents\My Games.

Point to note: Clean up your saves occasionally. 200 saves at 20 M per, tends to add up.

Also - do what I did. Move your Documents folder off your boot drive - which is often a smallish SSD these days.

[VulcanTourist]

A 1TB or even 2TB M.2 PCIe x 4 NVMe SSD like the HP-branded ones can be had pretty inexpensively... or at least that was true before COVID. I paid $300 for a 2TB one early this year, and when I built our current PCs in December 2017(?) I got the 1TB ones for about $200.

[FrozenWolf82]

So I've uninstalled and reinstalled Skyrim SE entirely, leaving no traces in the steam file, but I still have the no deployment available on Vortex

[FrozenWolf82]

So I've uninstalled and reinstalled Skyrim SE entirely, leaving no traces in the steam file, but I still have the no deployment available on Vortex

Update on that update, I went to the Vortex settings then mod tab and pressed the suggest and apply buttons and in combination with the reinstall, this fixed it.

Now the final thing I want to do is safely move the Vortex files from my C-drive to my d-drive because they're 40gb and they're taking up almost a fifth of my C-drive's storage.

Is there any youtube videos that might assist me with this if you guys can't?