4 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

To me so far the only really confusing part is exactly how his folders wound up in such a state in the first place.

If you make the "mistake" of asking MS to install MSFS on a dedicated drive, it will "over engineer" this setup for you, and you are stuck with it.

I do not know if you can avoid it by asking MS to install to a specific folder on that drive.. maybe.. but that is too late now..

8 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

Right now, the current solution seems to be working, but feels slightly over-engineered, in that there are now two folders involved, one on the C drive and one on his chosen Drive.

And this is a misunderstanding.. the "Local Cache folder" on the C drive actually contains a link to a Local Cache folder on the designated drive.  So not "two folders" but one folder, with a link from the C drive.

8 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

I do not know if you can avoid it by asking MS to install to a specific folder on that drive.. maybe.. but that is too late now..

Yup, you can specify a folder, which I, imaginatively enough, always name "Microsoft Flight Simulator" 🙃

I have installed and reinstalled a number of times for various reasons, and will probably be doing it again soon in a few days as part of the new beta, so I guess I've peered into these folders enough times to get used to them.

Plus for emergencies I have Symlinkcreator

Thing is, as Bert has implied, I did everything by the book during installation, not by default, but certainly by the book - I didn't do anything the sim didn't give me the option to do during setup. I prefer to keep my Windows (C) drive for exactly that, Windows, but for all it's incarnations over the years, Windows still retains one legacy function - no matter where you install programs, they will always put some files on your C drive, like it or not. Obviously some things, such as shortcuts to where you have installed your program(s) will inevitably be on the C drive, but nothing is ever as 'clean' as it could be. Such is computing.🙄

 

Anyhoo, I've now completed 2 UK test flights between a freeware airport (Manchester Barton) and a payware (Manchester Int), the first with a freeware plane I've used before (the Vertigo) and the second with one of the ones which first brought this issue to light (The DH Dragon Rapide). No issues other than a couple of stutters and pauses, but I'm going to put those down to either data being 'rebuilt' following all the file moving or server speed, seeing as I lost online ATC previously this evening.

I'm going to go to Orbx Central to verify all my downloads again, just to be on the safe side, and check my updaters for any other installed add-ons, to make sure everything is playing nicely.

2 minutes ago, 109Sqn said:

I'm going to go to Orbx Central to verify all my downloads again, just to be on the safe side, and check my updaters for any other installed add-ons, to make sure everything is playing nicely.

If you are in the mood, you can add the Orbx library to the Addon Linker folder list.

After you do that, you can activate and deactivate Orbx addons via the Linker.

4 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

If you are in the mood, you can add the Orbx library to the Addon Linker folder list.

After you do that, you can activate and deactivate Orbx addons via the Linker.

Will do. For some reason, I never got round to that. Probably thought it was more involved a process than it actually is for some reason.

Incidentally, I meant to add that the G:\WpSystem\S-1-5-21-3947187520-2354784913-3403033832-1002\AppData\Local\Packages folder contains all the games I tried during my Game Pass free trial. Perhaps that's why MSFS refers back to that folder as I trialled MSFS during the Game Pass free trial. Even though I went on to buy the full sim from MS Store, it must have stayed connected to that folder since it is using the same profile I used during the trial. The 12 other games folder contain a total  of only 176mb (as the games became unavailable to me after the trial of course). The MSFS folder is 182Gb.🙂

13 minutes ago, 109Sqn said:

Incidentally, I meant to add that the G:\WpSystem\S-1-5-21-3947187520-2354784913-3403033832-1002\AppData\Local\Packages folder contains all the games I tried during my Game Pass free trial.

Yup, just one more possible complication 😉

Good to see that all is well in the 109Sqn again!

What indeed was somewhat confusing was the existence of the directories on the G: drive, but that is explained by the GamePass test period.

Just for reference - since Day 1 I have also installed MSFS by the book (not Default) by selecting a specific folder when you're given the option during installation, in my case D:\MSFS.
The result is that: 
C:\Users\*****\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache\Packages contains 2 folders, Community and Official, both empty
D:\MSFS also contains 2 folders Community and Official, totalling around 165Gb. I should add that this is with Community almost empty since I use Add-Ons Linker to move things around.

The linking from C:\Users\*****\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache\Packages to D:\MSFS that Bert mentions must happen at Registry level (since the the 2 folders are completely empty) and this has never caused me any problems. In fact it makes reinstalling extremely easy. Just copy D:\MSFS to somewhere else, uninstall MSFS, copy D:\MSFS back, install MSFS. Literally just takes a few minutes. In fact, you can do it even faster by re-naming and re-renaming D:\MSFS 😉

Edit: The "linking" mentioned above is most likely simply because the last line in my UserCfg.opt (InstalledPackagesPath "D:\MSFS") tells MSFS where to look. 

Edited October 5, 20214 yr by SierraDelta