Experience moving Skyrim+MO+Steam to another hard drive

[Malakar]

Hey everybody,

before I ask my question let me explain to you what I'm planning to do.
Win 10 is coming yay!Thats the perfect time for getting new drives.Currently my System is installed on an old HDD and my games on an external HDD thats connected via usb 3.0 to my computer.
I now got a 126GB ssd for my OS,GTAV and SWTOR (If I would put Skyrim on it it would be os+skyrim exclusive since my Skyrim folder without mos download folder is like 75gb and with it its 90gb).
Then I got a new 2TB HDD for my games.My current HDD will be taken out of the system because it sucks and is dying.It crashed several times in the last few months so yeah I have to get rid of it.

Allright.
Win 10 will be installed on my SSD:Now I have to move my Steam install and Skyrim to my HDD.Does anybody have experience with this?Especially since all registry entries will be gone.Will I even be able to start Skyrim without having to reinstall it?I REALLY don't wanna reinstall all the mods again...

Well I might decide to put Skyrim onto my SSD instead of GTAV because Skyrim and SWTOR are the games I play the most.Dunno.

Well when I'm thinking about it:Only MO has to properly work because I got backups of the Mod Order and Load Order so that shouldn't be a problem.How does MO react to moving it somewhere else?Because It's in my Skyrim Folder atm.I guess I would have to put the MO folder on my SSD as well to get all the benefits of the SSD.

[lytelyte]

Yeah I moved my save file from my laptop to a new PC i just built.  It was pretty simple and worked without a problem.

 

1. Install a new copy of Skyrim from Steam or disk onto the new computer.

2. Copy the whole Steam/Steamapps/common/Skyrim folder from old HD to new HD and choose rewrite/replace all.

3. Go to your "My Saves" folder in your documents folder and copy over to new HD.  

4. I use Nexus Mod Manager and made sure all the esps and mods were loaded.  

 

You may have to verify your load order with Loot/MO on the new install.  But this seamlessly transferred my save games without have to uninstall all of my mods to transfer my savegame file.  (although it did also transfer the elusives glitches)

 

Good luck

 

[Malakar]

Why didn't I think about that?
Yeah well I made a backup of my Mod List and Load Order with MO so that shouldn't be a problem.Thanks

[Mord Sif]

We've recently moved our steam installation and Skyrim MO from HDD to SSD.

 

For MO we did this, and it worked perfectly:

 

Keep your old MO installation somewhere safe and away from where you want the new one installed. (Inside the main Skyrim folder is the recommended place to have your final MO installation, but it can work from anywhere.) Then install a new MO where you want it. Once it's in place and has recognised your master files copy the contents of your old MO's "mods" folder and paste it into the new MO's "mods" folder.

 

All the mods you had installed will then appear in MO's left pane and you'll just need to drag them into priority order and activate them. Take a look at your plugin list text files from your old profile folder to get them back in the order they were.

[Malakar]

We've recently moved our steam installation and Skyrim MO from HDD to SSD.

 

For MO we did this, and it worked perfectly:

 

Keep your old MO installation somewhere safe and away from where you want the new one installed. (Inside the main Skyrim folder is the recommended place to have your final MO installation, but it can work from anywhere.) Then install a new MO where you want it. Once it's in place and has recognised your master files copy the contents of your old MO's "mods" folder and paste it into the new MO's "mods" folder.

 

All the mods you had installed will then appear in MO's left pane and you'll just need to drag them into priority order and activate them. Take a look at your plugin list text files from your old profile folder to get them back in the order they were.

 

Can you tell me how much your load times / startup time decreased since moving you Skyrim from HDD to SSD?

Does anybody know if MO keeps any files in my documents ?

Well I'll first try reinstalling steam and Skyrim and then just copying everything from my old Skyrim folder (thats including MO) to the new folder and see if that works.

[Mord Sif]

Well I've hardly even seen an in-game loading screen yet! Everything is much faster and much smoother so far. How long it takes to load when you first start Skyrim depends on how many mods you have installed, but it does feel quicker there, too.

 

MO doesn't keep anything in My Documents, but when you first run a new installation of it I think it copies the Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini from there to your profile's folder, so you'll probably need to create those if they aren't there - by running the Skyrim Launcher. If you ever need to make changes to those inis to use through MO you need to change the ones in your MO profile folder, not the ones in My Documents.

[Malakar]

Nah I'll just backup the skyrim folder located in my documents and then move the needed files there.

Wow I think I'll put Skyrim on my SSD then...

My current HDD is really slow.When downloading steam games with 12.5mb/s it stops relatively often saying "writing files to hard drive".Dunno if it's just a normal thing or because It's downloading to my external hard drive...

When starting skyrim through mo:
Pressing SKSE and waiting for Skyrim to start:22 seconds
Skyrim started,waiting for menu options to appear:37 seconds
Pressing continue - First loading screen: 1 minute 1 second
Fast Traveling (to whiterun): 47 seconds