moving the vortex staging folder to another drive

Purge your mods before you change it. If you move the folder with everything still deployed you can end up with links pointing at nothing and a game that won't start.

Settings, then the Mods tab, and change the Mod Staging Folder for that game. Vortex offers to move everything across for you. The catch is hardlink deployment (the default for most games) needs the staging folder on the same drive as the game itself. Point it at a different drive and deployment fails or it pushes you onto another method. So if you're doing this to free space, move the game to that drive too.