Game won’t start after redownloading on external harddrive

Hello! I bought an external hard drive yesterday as me and my boyfriend are sharing his computer right now, and my sims game was just taking up way too much space. I uninstalled my game from steam and the EA app and then downloaded it from both apps again straight into my external hard drive, but when i tried to launch sims i just got the “an error on our end caused the launch to fail. Try again a little later” message. The folder  named “Electronic Arts” hasn’t showed up (ig because i haven’t started the game yet) so i can’t do anything to fix the game in that folder and as you might’ve guessed i currently don’t have any CC or mods downloaded because we’ll, the folder containing the mods folder isn’t even on my computer… i would literally do anything to get my game up and running again😔