Drive letter shift, Tes Mod Manager won't start up

[Hermaeus Moron]

I have run into an onerous problem over the last few days. I took a break from Skyrim following a move about a year and a half ago, and am eager to get back into it. Unfortunately, whenever I try to boot up Tes Mod Manager, I get the following messages (see attached screenshots), and the program refuses to start. Checking the TMM crash log revealed this:

 

Spoiler

2023/03/10-22:12:49:Low    : BOSS path: D:\Steam\SteamApps\common\Skyrim\BOSS
2023/03/10-22:12:49:Low    : Loot path: D:\Mods\LOOT
2023/03/10-22:12:49:Low    : Ini path: C:\Users\Marc D\Documents\My games\Skyrim
2023/03/10-22:12:49:Low    : ESP path: C:\Users\Marc D\AppData\Local\Skyrim
2023/03/10-22:12:49:Low    : *************************************************************
2023/03/10-22:12:49:Low    : TesModManager version 1.6.56 started in Skyrim mode
2023/03/10-22:13:17:Error  : One or more of Tes Mod Manager's directories do not exist and cannot be created under F:\Steam\steamapps\common\skyrim\obmm.
Error: Could not find a part of the path 'D:\Steam\SteamApps\common\Skyrim\obmm\mods\'.

 

Unfortunately, I think I already know the source of the problem. You see, for reasons I still don't understand, several months back my OS decided to change the drive letter of the external drive I use exclusively for gaming. No matter how many times I tried to change it back to the previous drive letter (D), my OS kept reassigning it every time it booted up. After a while, it started reassigning D to some critical partition of its own hard drive that it was impossible to change the letter of. I never found a working solution for this problem online, so after a while I just said "fuck it" and rolled with it, re-designating my gaming drive as F.

 

I suspect there's some hidden ini, config file, registry, or something that's screwing this up, but for the life of me I can't find it. And given the massive amount of mods and merges I have archived/listed and TMM's  penchant for deleting those lists when uninstalling, I am extremely hesitant to attempt uninstalling the program (knowing my luck, it wouldn't fix the problem anyway). Furthermore, while other people seem to have reported this or similar problems in other forums, those that find a solution seem to be unusually glib in describing how they fixed the problem. And surprisingly. searching the LL technical support forums have failed to yield other posts addressing this issue. If anything, the results I get back for things like "drive letter change" are utterly irrelevant to my needs (e.g. posts talking about load orders, which is moot when the damn mod manager won't start up).

 

I can tell there's a relatively easy fix for this, but for the life of me, I cannot find it. I am currently at my wits end. How do I fix or get around this?

[spoonsinger]

Apart from the whole that doesn't sound good. You could try doing a symbolic link from where it thinks it is to where is actually is. (mklink command line or for a GUI https://github.com/amd989/Symlinker)

Edited March 14, 2023 by spoonsinger
Morning!

[Hermaeus Moron]

On 3/14/2023 at 1:30 AM, spoonsinger said:

Apart from the whole that doesn't sound good. You could try doing a symbolic link from where it thinks it is to where is actually is. (mklink command line or for a GUI https://github.com/amd989/Symlinker)

Much appreciated, but I have no idea how to do that, and the readme that came with the program is rather glib. Also, I have updated to Windows 10 since I last tried playing Skyrim, and the link says support stopped at Windows 8.

 

Edit: Scratch that. Did a little more digging under "symbolic links," entering the "subst" command in cmd did the trick. Thanks for the tip, couldn't have done it without you

Edit 2: Okay, new problem. Now it looks like I have to do it every time I restart my OS. Great, back to reassigning drive letters on startup all over again...

Edited March 17, 2023 by Hermaeus Moron
Only a temporary fix

[Michele Magus]

You could open the "Computer Management" app, then select "Disk Management".
From there, select your HDD/SSD and change the drive letter assigned there.
Just a thought.

[Hermaeus Moron]

5 minutes ago, Michele Magus said:

You could open the "Computer Management" app, then select "Disk Management".
From there, select your HDD/SSD and change the drive letter assigned there.
Just a thought.

Tried that already. After a while, my OS started assigning D to a drive partition I couldn't change by default. I mentioned this in the OP.