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Drive lost - how to tell DIM that I need to start from scratch

DanaTADanaTA Posts: 13,178
in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

I lost my hard drive that had My Library on it.  The DIM still lists everything as installed.  How do I tell it that I need to reinstall everything again?

Dana

Comments

  • fixmypcmikefixmypcmike Posts: 19,582

    The Manifest folder tells DIM what it has installed and where -- delete the files there (or move them somewhere else just in case) and DIM will see everything as uninstalled

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 99,449

    That is, as I recall, in the Public Documents folder/Daz Install Manager/Manifests/ by default

  • DanaTADanaTA Posts: 13,178

    Thank you both!  I'll give this a try later!

    Dana

  • brainmuffinbrainmuffin Posts: 1,184

    I had an external drive go back on a Windows laptop I play with a bit. After several unsuccessful attempts at stopping DIM from looking at drive D:, I finally edited the Registry after doing a full uninstall. It works now.

  • DanaTADanaTA Posts: 13,178

    I haven't had problems with the DIM.  It's just that the drive that contained my library (thus, all my DAZ content) failed, and the techs haven't been able to recover it.  

    Dana

  • DanaTADanaTA Posts: 13,178
    edited May 2020

    After I followed these instrucions, the shop called and said they finally managed to get the data off the drive.  It was more than a week they were trying, I just figured it was a lost cause.  So...now I have the whole thing back.  Am I stuck, having to just let the DIM download and install these things over again, or is there a way to tell it I got them?  I deleted the files in that folder.  With "Shift + Delete".    indecision    I should have just moved them somewhere.  It was a lot of files, though.   The DIM is a database of sorts.  It would be better if it just had a column in the record that showed as installed.  It would be a lot easier on your system than moving files around like that.

     

    Dana

    Post edited by DanaTA on
  • fixmypcmikefixmypcmike Posts: 19,582

    Any chance you have a backup that might have the manifest files?   When you download a zip it downloads a .dsx for each one, which won't have the install information but could be used to trick DIM into seeing them as installed, but I cn't think of any easy way to create all those .dsx files without downloading the .zip's.

  • fixmypcmikefixmypcmike Posts: 19,582

    Okay, here's an idea.  If DIM is downloading a file and the download is interrupted there's a partial file in the downloads folder, so that you can restart the download and it will resume where it left off.  It will have a name like:

    IM00007639-01_DarkMatterV4A4.zip.{328511f8-34ff-125c-13db-9d3669448f3c}.part

    Remove everything after the first period and change it to dsx and put it in the manifestfiles folder, and DIM will think it's been installed.  It's a hassle, but if you sort your "Ready to Download" tab by file size you can just do it for the largest files.  Once you've gotten it down to a manageable size you can download the smaller ones.  You'll still have problems if you need to uninstall something, but at least DIM will think everything is installed.

  • DanaTADanaTA Posts: 13,178

    Thanks!  I will consider these options.  I have plenty of bandwidth, I just dread the time it will consume to just reinstall everything.  I've been doing this since about 2007, 2008.  surprise  But I haven't done much rendering in the past two years or so.

     

    Dana

  • fastbike1fastbike1 Posts: 4,077

    This is why backup files, not on the cloud, are a good practice.

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