Greetings All !

In an effort to recover from extremely-frequent Windows crashes, I elected to buy a new SSD drive and install Windows 7 64-bit fresh onto that. I still have my old drive. It's mounted up as a secondary drive.

I'd like to get back to my previous Skyrim configuration. So, I've already downloaded and installed Steam, Skyrim, and BOSS onto the new drive. I've downloaded Nexus Mod Manager, but I haven't installed it yet. But now I'd like to:

a) Restore my mods' installations.

Restore my saved games.

c) Restore Nexus Mod manager (so that it "sees" my already-installed mods once again).

Can anybody advise me on procedures to do all of that?

I would assume that for "a", I'd simply locate the directory where the mod files are installed on the old drive... and copy all that stuff over to the exact same path on the new drive. And the same thing for the saved games (though I have no clue where those might be located).

But as far as getting Mod Manager to see all of that, I'm not so sure.

Thanks!

-= Dave =-

That is basically what you have to do. By default:

Installed mod is saved in your install game directory. Typically C:\Program FIles\Skyrim\Data

Saved mods by NMM are saved in another directory, depending on your choice when you install NMM. Mine is
C:\Games\Nexus Mod Manager\Skyrim\Mods

I would reinstall from the archived downloads rather than the mod files themselves. This should give you a cleaner reinstall.

Now, since SSD space is precious, you can put these archive directories on another drive on your new install. I have done this with all my mod managers so my SSD only has the games on it, all the archives and extracted mods take up space on my data drive, and only my installed mods are in the game directory. Yes, the Data Files folder where the extracted/installed mods does need to be in the Data Files folder in the game install directory. I am just talking about the zip files that you download from Nexus.

OK, thanks very much for the information!

I've located the archived mods and have moved them over to the same path on the new drive, then fired up Nexus Mod Manager. It complained that I hadn't initialized Skyrim yet, but it let me past that. So I was then able to tell it exactly what paths to use for the Mod and Install Info directories. I then shut it down.

Installed SKSE. (Almost forgot about that.)

Launched Skyrim, just to get it to initialize and detect my video card settings, and then I shut it down again. I was HOPING it would have done something that would confirm what directory it was going to use for saved games.

I located my old saves in F:\My Documents\My Games\Skyrim.

I'm thinking Skyrim itself will probably try to shove the data onto C: (even though I do have another non-SSD drive available... It'd be nice to do quick-saves without seeing my screen hesitate.).

I was about to tell you I wasn't seeing the saved game directory on my C: drive, but I just spotted it. So, all I need to do now is copy those over, then fire up Nexus Mod Manager and start installing mods.

Guess I'll know if this all works later tonight when I actually play. (I'm currently remoted in from elsewhere.)

Thanks very much !!

-= Dave =-