Native Access Application Folder access?

Hey, I realize I'm months late on this thread, but I found it when Googling the same issue earlier today. I managed to solve it just now and wanted to come back and post here on the off chance it helps anyone in the future who sees this in the situation I was in earlier.

Context- Got a new external hard drive, on which I store a lot of Native Instruments/Native Access products. Tried pretty much everything to get things onto the new extHD and no matter what I did, got this red exclamation mark both in the Preferences section of Native Access when I tried to set the file paths. Also, though, when I did a full reinstall of anything with these new file paths onto my extHD, the installation would say successful- and from what I can tell it, it was- but the exclamation mark next to the product in the NA library view showed it's orange exclamation point and the "repair" option, as if it couldn't find what it had just reinstalled. If you clicked on that and selected relocate, it would be pointing to the correct location on the new extHD already; if you clicked on that to reconfirm that location, it would give a successful confirmation, but nothing would change. Although the actual products seem to be functional- or at least correctly installed on a technical file level- I assume this will lead to issues on more than one level.

This was driving me absolutely insane all day. I even uninstalled literally everything related to Native Instruments on my computer (deep dive into all the internal HD contents, .plist files, etc like NI instructs) and reinstalled it all. Thought this was working when I reopened the newly installed NA because it showed the option to install each product as if it were new, but as soon as I tried to set the installation path to the extHD and do the install, exact same thing happened. Maddening. Getting a new computer soon so I figure if NA can't figure this out, when the time comes for that it's going to be hell.

Solution- saw another person post with my same problem elsewhere on here, saying he changed the name of his drive and it worked, but he didn't know why and it didn't work for another person in the thread. Turns out this was the answer for me, but because of a specific reason. When I set up my folders in this new drive, the first folder had a "/" character in the name, while none of the folders on my old extHD did. I've noticed in Maschine before when saving FX presets etc that it can't handle certain special characters; for example, it tries to convert "/" to ":" - didn't think much of it because it would either give me an error or interpret it how it preferred. As soon as I removed it from the name of the folder in the installation paths for NA though, everything was good as new- no problems at all.

TLDR, because that was far too long- if you're experiencing an error like this, make 100% sure that no special characters are in the names of your drive or anything along the file path (maybe certain characters like ":" will work but I don't remember which ones it doesn't like and which ones it does). It appears NI software cannot interpret this across the board, and NA will not give you any sort of specific error message to help you figure this out.

cheers