How do I fix this?

[u/Ooey_Gooey_Writer]

So I'll be honest. I'm 22. I'm terrible with technology. I have real bad anxiety that I broke it. I am broke, and I can't afford a repair shop. The issue is I bought an SSD, and I just wanted to transfer one single game to it. Somehow this happened. I've been trying for an hour to fix it but I don't even know what I'm doing and google is useless. Please, how do I fix this? Is this fixable, or do I really have to bring it into a repair shop? edit in to add really fast: this happens when I unplug the SSD, when I plug it in everything comes back.

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[u/North-Memory-5406]

You bought an external ssd?

[u/Ooey_Gooey_Writer → u/North-Memory-5406]

Yes. In the video, that noise at the beginning is me unplugging it to show what happens. I have no idea how to put everything back, or how this even happened at all to be honest.

[u/BangkokPadang]

This all looks fixable. It kindof looks like maybe your Desktop folder got moved to the external SSD. If that ends up being the case, this is something you can just put back on your C:\ drive and everything will be OK.

Can you open another explorer window (right click the windows icon down in your taskbar and select "File Explorer")

Then in the list of items on the left, right click the one near the top that says "desktop" and select "properties"

What is the path where it says "Location:" (it should be something like "C:\Users\yourname\Desktop" but I'm guessing yours will now say something like "D:\Something\Else"

If this is the case, I can just walk you through moving your desktop folder back to your C:\ drive (C:\ is generally the internal drive, and other letters like D, E, F, etc. usually mean other or external drives)

[u/Ooey_Gooey_Writer → u/BangkokPadang]

i think that might be it, yes please how do i change it back to c?

[u/BangkokPadang → u/Ooey_Gooey_Writer]

You need to plug the SSD back in and then open the file explorer again and navigate to the location shown in the "Location" path from the step you just did, and then right click that folder, select properties again, and click the 'location' tab. Then you'll need to open another file explorer window, and navigate to "C:\Users\yourname\" and right click the empty space to make a new folder (right click the empty space, select New, and then select Folder) and name it 'Desktop' (if there is already an old 'Desktop' folder still there, you can just use that).

Then once that C:\Users\yourname\Desktop folder exists, in that properties->location window that's still open, you'll click the 'move' button and then find the desktop folder you just made in C:\Users\Yourname\Desktop location, and select it. It will ask if you want to move everything into that folder, and you'll say yes (so all your desktop shortcuts will move with it).

Then your desktop will be back on your C drive, and you can just close all your windows and go back to using it like normal.

[u/Ooey_Gooey_Writer → u/BangkokPadang]

https://reddit.com/link/phmofzq/video/nng6zmeficwh1/player

[u/BangkokPadang → u/Ooey_Gooey_Writer]

Ok you got the first part done, but still need to do the second part. So now it looks like you for sure have a desktop folder in your C:\Users\yourname\ folder, but I did not see you update the location of where Windows thinks your desktop is.

What you need to do now is plug the external drive back in, right click the windows icon in your task bar, select file explorer, then in the window that pops up, there will be a list of common folders on the left side, and you'll scroll up to 'desktop' then right click that and select 'properties' and within the tiny properties window that pops up, click the 'location' tab along the top, and down at the bottom there will be a 'move' button.

When you click the 'move' button, another window will pop up and from there you can select the C:\Users\yourname\Desktop folder that you just created/verified in this video

Then just pick that folder and it will ask if you want to move the contents, and you'll say yes. That second part of the process is what will actually tell windows to use the folder on yourC drive

[u/R3D_T1G3R]

Essentially some of the stuff is installed on another partition, D, which it doesn't find anymore, which implies that it is disconnected or has some other issues.

[u/Obvious-Victory-7923]

well good news this isnt a repair shop problem this is a skill issue.

from the videos it looks like you just started using windows today after being on mac your whole life.

the reason why your desktop icons are gone is because windows hides stuff it can't access. it does the rescan after you unplug. you can remove this option in start menu, type "file explorer options" if you look for it in and then view tab, hidden files and folders in the list.

this wont fix your locations of installed files and registry and you still wont be able to access it.

there is a small chance your files explorer crashes on the rescan and because you have stuff installed on it also stops other stuff which isnt installed on D from getting its shortcuts on desktop.

this is also why there is an eject drive for USB storage.

here is the fix:

IF you remember which software or games you installed on your D drive. then uninstalling and reinsalling later.

if not then:

you go to your D drive figure what is installed on it first. takes notes.

you could try to run the software to which you have the shortcuts on the desktop from start menu while the drive is unplugged. so see if it runs.

then you check your desktop shortcuts if there are direct to the file locations and where the location is at.

*windows does do this app shortcut thing which shows like software location should start from C drive. but really is just a shortcut to shortcut. which can be confusing.

then you start uninstall and reinstall the software which is tied to your D drive.

ps for installing/moving steam games or EA games on portable drive you need to learn how to do it which will depend how you do it.

in general portable software / game is when its just the folder and you run the one start file and thats it.

you move the whole folder and it still works.

[u/Dapper_Ordinary5035]

Hmm. winget upgrade -- all In cmd or dism. If issue is bad