I had to unfortunately do a full reformat on my machine and after getting back up and running I'm coming across
this error in the scene I was working in :

Warning: The following node types are using incomplete asset definitions:
Sop/tower_001

This object which contained the HDA I had created is now empty. This was the first HDA i had ever made, mind you,
but it was working just fine until now.

Is it possible the HDA by default saves in a location that is different than my project? Perhaps it was on my primary drive
that was reformatted?

The drive letters have switched a bit so I thought that may be the issue but I don't see an .hda or .otl anywhere within the folder
structure of my project.

Any help would be great appreciated as if this asset is missing I'll have lost quite a bit of work.

Seems to be the case. Just tried creating a fresh new HDA. Default Location :

“CUsers/****/Documents/houdini17.5/otls/****_subnet2.hdalc”

That's infuriating. Why would this be the default location? Lesson learned I guess.

Also, why is there no way to at least see the absolute path of where this hda used to live?

Just did some test and I see now that you would ideally have an “hda” sub-directory as part of your project if they were indeed project specific. I just made a new one and proceeded to purposefully delete it and got the same result I'm experiencing with my tower asset.

My questions are as follows:

1)

Is there anyway for the hda to be embedded within the file? The only reason I wanted to make one in the fist place is because it seemed like the only way I could promote parameters on a subnet that could then be further manipulated by my copy setup. Ideally, i'd just want to object merge one of these objects in but have certain parameters accessible.

2) I still don't see any acknowledgement of the original path to the .hda file anywhere after deletion. If I open up my .hip in a text editor I fail to see any specific references to where it was being stored.