"Move to another HD" procedure didn't work?

[ELaw 11]

So... I'm trying to use the procedure in the "How to move FS2020 install to another HD fast" tip to move my install (to a different location on the same drive) and it seems like it didn't "take".  Wondering if anyone else has had this happen?

I bought FS through the MS store, didn't pay attention to the suggested install path, and it ended up several folder levels deep under my user folder.  So I:

1. Copied C:\users\<me>\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe to C:\FS2020new.

2. Uninstalled FS by right-clicking the icon on the start menu and selecting "uninstall".  I then verified the folder under "packages" was gone.

3. Reinstalled FS from the MS store (it didn't ask for an install location).

4. Started FS.  It said it needed to download updates, asked for a package location, and I specified C:\FS2020.

5. Paused the download after about 2 minutes (maybe a minute and a half?).

6. Deleted the folder C:\FS2020 and renamed C:\FS2020new to "FS2020".

7. Launched FS.

At that point it continued downloading, and as far as I can tell, is going to re-download the entire thing.

Did I do something wrong?  It's not the end of the world as I'm not on a metered connection and can live for a few hours without the game, but I might want to move it later to another drive and wonder if I could do something differently.

[shipdriver 20]

I thought the fast way was to do it from the Apps page in Windows settings, where there is a Move button for it that worked perfectly well for me. The procedure you posted seems awfully complicated. Is there something I'm missing?

[ELaw 11]

The "move" button there is grayed out for me.  Maybe it's only enabled if your machine has more than one drive?

[TheFamilyMan 281]

Decided that I wanted to swap my dedicated FS drives, such that MSFS gets a NVMe and FSX-SE a sata ssd.  Standard stuff...right?  Did a image backup of my FSX-SE drive, then used a partition tool, which I used in the past with complete success to clone system drives, to clone my MSFS drive onto the FSX-SE drive.  After that, I set the drive letters appropriately, reformatted the old MSFS drive and installed the FSX-SE image backup onto it.  All is now as it should be and as it once was.  Ran FSX-SE, worked as if nothing happened.  Ran MSFS and it immediate proclaimed "the install is missing".   Rechecked everything...right drive letter with the same content at before (at least at the 10K' level).  After much effort and gnashing of teeth, I ended up having to reinstall MSFS on the NVMe drive.  Not a huge deal since I have a really fast internet connection, but still irritating and time consuming.  At least my controllers configuration was preserved through the reinstall.  So now the big question that I could not find an answer for:  What sort of monkey business did MS toss into MSFS such that this common and traditional "move to a new disk" operation fails for a MSFS install?

BTW, that move button was grayed out for me as well.  Also, I had the good sense to target all the install stuff onto the same drive for the original install.

[ELaw 11]

So an update... I bought another SSD and installed it, now I have a D drive.  Went to "apps" under "settings' and the "move" button was enabled.  Joy!

The joy was short-lived though.  When I pressed the button, a dialog came up asking me for a new location and it would not allow selection of a path, just a drive (D was the only option).  There was also a checkbox marked "move downloadable content".  So I checked the box, hit "ok", and it seemed to do stuff for a couple of minutes.

When it was done, I checked the space on the D drive and clearly very little had moved - the (formerly empty) drive had about 10 GB of space used.  So I figured maybe I need to fire up FS to actually move the files, so I launched the program.  After the usual initial delay, it came up and said an update was available that I had to download in the MS store.  So I close the program, go to store, "download" the update (which clearly didn't do much), and re-launch the program.

It came up with an "installation manager" screen saying an update was available and that I needed to download it.  The download size?  110GB!  Yes, again I get to download the whole thing because apparently downloading the whole thing yesterday wasn't good enough.  And... it wanted to download to the old install location on my C drive... luckily I was able to change it to my D drive.

I have to say the graphics and some other things with this program are absolutely fantastic, but I bet someone with just a few months' programming experience could write a better installer.  The whole install process (again this is from the MS store) ls laughable and seemingly has more bugs than an ant farm.

Edit: one other thing I forgot to mention, after my adventure outlined in the first post, my installation folder on the C drive takes up a little over 200 GB!  It's weird, there don't seem to be two copies of every folder like you'd expect if it just tried to recreate the same structure.  But one way or another I think almost every file must be there twice.

Edited September 16, 2020 by ELaw

[Bert Pieke 7,594]

The Update is not related to your Move...

We all are dealing with the new content.. in my case 11 GB... not 110.

[ELaw 11]

I know but you just pointed out my exact issue: why do most people have to download 11 GB and I have to download 10 times as much?

[ELaw 11]

Speaking of downloading... would it be silly to ask why the program uses 20% GPU when downloading files, and *100% GPU* if I minimize the window while it's downloading?  Maybe they envisioned an alternate use of the program as a GPU burn-in tool? 😕