I used to reinstall Windows10 every 6 months when running FSX and P3D and it was always painful but necessary, what you went through is pretty standards this hobby is a niche not mainstream so we have to go to great lengths to make things work, that is an endless cycle

I will admit Flight Sim 2020 is much easier now and I don't invest as heavily into addons anymore, so I just don't have to reinstall things anymore which is far less stressful 

1 hour ago, Matthew Kane said:

I used to reinstall Windows10 every 6 months when running FSX and P3D and it was always painful but necessary, what you went through is pretty standards this hobby is a niche not mainstream so we have to go to great lengths to make things work, that is an endless cycle

I will admit Flight Sim 2020 is much easier now and I don't invest as heavily into addons anymore, so I just don't have to reinstall things anymore which is far less stressful 

Wow every six months, that's a huge amount of time being spent on just reinstalling Windows all the time.  I'm sure though it gets easier the more you do it though.  Being that I haven't done it in 5 years and I'm really rusty which is why it took me two full days to do it and have everything properly installed, setup and ready to go the way I want.

Yeah I love the eye candy that MSFS provides but I can't give up my other sims, even the old ones like FSX I still really enjoy flying my old classic airplanes (it helps I have all the best scenery and other add-ons for it).  I love every simulator I use for different reasons and my philosophy is since I spent so much money on add-ons and time learning to use them all I'm not just going to throw all that down the toilet just because they are considered outdated or legacy simulators.  i have just as much fun flying in FSX as I do in MSFS or X-Plane 12.

You are right though, the constant maintenance can be overwhelming at times but overall I think it's worth it personally.  Many others may think I'm nuts but I'm ok with that 😀

Edited December 20, 20232 yr by Kalnon

FSX SE allows for backups. Grab a usb stick and you have a backup.

It might be too late, but these days, there is little to no benefit from separate drives when using fast M.2 and a reasonably good CPU like the Ryzen 5800X.  I would recommend one larger  C drive only and you might actually find you gain some performance.  Another benefit is that the OS will not let you delete your primary boot drive no matter what any poorly configured installer tries to do.

The days of having separate drives is a hold over from FSX days some 17 years ago.  CPUs, bus performance, I/O, storage performance have improved considerably in 17 years so there is absolutely no benefit from having multiple drives.

EDIT: on a side note, I had an Installer from Aerosoft that wiped out a huge branch of my OS registry so I lost the ability to uninstall a slew of other products completely unrelated.

Edited December 20, 20232 yr by CO2Neutral

48 minutes ago, CO2Neutral said:

It might be too late, but these days, there is little to no benefit from separate drives when using fast M.2 and a reasonably good CPU like the Ryzen 5800X.  I would recommend one larger  C drive only and you might actually find you gain some performance.  Another benefit is that the OS will not let you delete your primary boot drive no matter what any poorly configured installer tries to do.

The days of having separate drives is a hold over from FSX days some 17 years ago.  CPUs, bus performance, I/O, storage performance have improved considerably in 17 years so there is absolutely no benefit from having multiple drives.

EDIT: on a side note, I had an Installer from Aerosoft that wiped out a huge branch of my OS registry so I lost the ability to uninstall a slew of other products completely unrelated.

Yeah you are right but the main reason I have a small OS drive is back when I built my pc, I built it up little by little over a long period since I was on a budget at the time (after a long break from flight simming and gaming I suddenly rediscovered my passion for it and decided to build a new pc) and I wanted an M.2 NMVe as a boot drive, back then a 500 GB one cost a lot compared to today and it was about all I could afford at the time.

I figured I could always buy more drives later when needed because the motherboard I chose has a ton of SATA ports and two M.2 ports so I have more than enough room for expansion.

I later got my 4TB HDD, drive that got wiped, next as a second drive.  I chose it because the sims I was using at the time and many of the games I wanted to play would work just fine on a WD Black HDD with it's reasonable speeds and acceptable game load times, huge amount of storage for cheap, I even got it on a Black Friday sale so got it even cheaper.

I later got another, larger M.2 drive and a SATA SSD for new simulators like MSFS, XP12 and I was getting into combat sims like IL-2 Great Battles and DCS World and Star Citizen (don't judge me) all of which work much better on. So that's how I ended up with so many drives, mainly due to budget constraints.

If I had the money I would have gotten two 4TB M.2 drives and a bunch of 4TB SATA SSD's 😀

 

I use revo to uninstall things as it'll warn me, "the folder is shared by x,y and z, proceed?"

5 hours ago, Zatoichi said:

I use revo to uninstall things as it'll warn me, "the folder is shared by x,y and z, proceed?"

Good idea, I've heard of Revo but never tried it, maybe I should.  I heard it does a much better job of uninstalling things as well.

BTW Update: I finally finished reinstalling FSX and P3Dv5 and all of the endless mods and add-ons I have for them last night.  I ran the Windows defrag tool to see if the drive needed to be optimized and after installing everything (except some old freeware that I lost forever), the drive was 45% fragmented 😱

Took all night to defrag the drive and I still have X-Plane 11 (and all the add-ons for it) to reinstall lol

23 hours ago, Kalnon said:

BTW Update: I finally finished reinstalling FSX and P3Dv5 and all of the endless mods and add-ons I have for them last night.  I ran the Windows defrag tool to see if the drive needed to be optimized and after installing everything (except some old freeware that I lost forever), the drive was 45% fragmented

A bit confused, thought you were using M.2 and/or SSD?  You don't defragment those storage mediums, defrag is ONLY for HDD.

1 hour ago, CO2Neutral said:

A bit confused, thought you were using M.2 and/or SSD?  You don't defragment those storage mediums, defrag is ONLY for HDD.

Not for these particular sims.  The drive that was wiped was a WD Black 4TB HDD.  As I explained earlier, when first building the pc I have now, I only started with a 500GB M.2 as a boot drive and the WD Black I bought to store FSX, P3Dv5 and XP11 because I was on a budget and slowly bought more storage over time.

I  now have another M.2 and an SSD for storing MSFS & XP12 but the other sims and my collection of freeware & other files I left on the HDD.  Sorry for the confusion.

Edited December 24, 20232 yr by Kalnon

There are multiple data recovery software programs out there such as Minitool. You will get your drive back. Just dont format it.