I use a StoreMI accelerated drive to store the bulk of my games. After installing Windows 11 on a separate SSD, StoreMI worked right away after installing (which shocked me), but the next day all my games were gone.

Honestly, if that was all this was I wouldn’t be writing a post about it. Unfortunately(?) for me Windows still showed the space being taken, despite the files being completely inaccessible. Unfortunately I didn’t take any screenshots of the issue while it was happening, but essentially in Steam (after having added the drive as a library location the previous day) none of the games on that drive showed as installed. The first thing I did was remove and re-add the drive to Steam but when nothing showed up I checked the directory where everything was supposed to be and (aside from a couple files Steam generated) it was completely empty. I check Windows Explorer to see if 3TB of my data had disappeared or been deleted and nope, it thought it was still there. Yeehaw.

Preamble over, we’ll just skip to my troubleshooting steps and the fix.

Pre-fix steps, because the SSD I use for my cache wasn’t showing in Windows.

1. Check Device Manager to see if there was anything out of the ordinary with the PCI devices. There were some yellow icons, so I installed the latest chipset drivers.
2. The drive still didn’t show up, so I verified it was present in the BIOS and tweaked a couple settings to enable more NVMe features.
3. Tried separating the cache and my drive in my current StoreMI install. Nothing changed.
4. Uninstalled StoreMI. This made the SSD I was “missing” reappear in Disk Management, so I felt I was making some progress.
5. Reinstalled StoreMI and re-set up my cache. Nothing.
6. Ran WizTree (which is an incredible product by the way) to see where space was being consumed and saw that all the files were still in their original directory structure but I wasn’t able to browse to them. I tried with PowerShell, I tried from within WizTree. Hell, I even tried recreating a filepath with no luck.

So that’s everything I did before trying what ultimately fixed it, and Jesus Christ am I mad at the fix. chkdsk E: /R. It was fucking… chkdsk that fixed it. It took almost 10 hours, but all my files showed up in a recovered folder and I was able to ctrl+x them and Steam was totally happy after that. I didn’t do any extensive testing, but I launched a handful of games without any issues.

So yeah, if you’re reading this and having StoreMI issues, try chkdsk if you need to recover files.