My steam games seem to be vanishing from my HDD

[Dan the bloke]

The other day I tried to play Tomb Raider for the first time after installing it a few months back but I got some error message. But since then Ive gotten an SSD, moved all my stuff on my 2TB HDD to an external, formatted the drive and then moved it all back. Most of the games have been working fine, but tomb raider said that it had 10GB of data on my local disk, and didnt find anything wrong when I verified the files. But when I looked, there werent actually any files for it anywhere, so I had to "remove" files and reinstall.
Then just now, I tried to start L4D2, and it told me I was missing a DLL file, so I verified the install, and its now downloading 7.4GB of missing files.

Whats going on, and why are my files vanishing?
Could it be something to do with my HDD turning off after being idle for 30 mins?

Any help would be wonderful thanks

[kalniel]

More likely to be the moving, but could simply be the change to steam formats that happened a little while back - all games had to be reverified and downloaded almost entirely again, but this was done usually only when you played a game again rather than all at once.

[Dan the bloke]

I dont think it could be the change in formats, because Ive checked a load of other games, and they show up as installed on my library, but they dont actually have a folder when I go into the steamapps folder :/
Another odd thing ive found is that Far cry 2 cant start through steam, but the files are in the steamapps folder and I can launch it fine through the .exe

Ugh there is literally always something going wrong with my computer.

[Jonj1611]

The folders for the games should be inside "common" inside the steamapps folder, have you looked in there?

As for it showing the size but then you cant find them, in the steamapps folder you should see lots of appmanifest files, they are basically the info file for whatever game it relates to, inside the file it contains the file size, whether it installed etc so is probably getting the info from that.

[jim]

Did you back them up and restore them using Steam when you did the SSD swap, or did you just copy all the files over in Windows?

[Dan the bloke]

The folders for the games should be inside "common" inside the steamapps folder, have you looked in there?

As for it showing the size but then you cant find them, in the steamapps folder you should see lots of appmanifest files, they are basically the info file for whatever game it relates to, inside the file it contains the file size, whether it installed etc so is probably getting the info from that.

Yeah, I know where to find the files, its just there arent all the ones that there should be.
And ive done the recommended deleting of the appmanifest folder, which didnt help.

Did you back them up and restore them using Steam when you did the SSD swap, or did you just copy all the files over in Windows?

I just copied the steamapps folder to the external, then after wiped the HDD, I moved the whole folder back and set it as a library

[Jonj1611]

Where did you read about deleting the appmanifest files?

[Dan the bloke]

Where did you read about deleting the appmanifest files?

Right here: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_...8676-EFLX-7453.
Thats the help page from the error message that popped up when I tried running any of the faulty games

[Jonj1611]

Ah right, no thats talking about the appcache folder which is different to the appmanifest files I was talking about.

[GeorgeStorm]

I just copied the steamapps folder to the external, then after wiped the HDD, I moved the whole folder back and set it as a library

If you just copied then there are probably links/dlls/registry entries which are no longer correct which are causing the problems, sadly you can't just copy the main body of the game and hope it will work.