Submitted 12 hours ago by it_depends_man@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/search/?q=disk+write+error&p=1
If I had a wish for christmas from GabeN or Valve in general, it would be actually meaningful error messages from steam.
If I had two wishes, I would like a community tool to share configs to make games work that require tweaking.
But I’d be very happy if I got better error messages.
Disk Write Error is very much more likely to be a Windows (+/- Linux) error rather than a Steam error. If Steam can’t write to the disk for any reason, all it can say is there is a disk write error. It’s unlikely to know whether that’s due to the hard-drive failing or the hard drive going offline for some reason or even just a permissions error.
I’m not surprised there are 2000 pages, because hard drive write failures are very common, and as the OS has responsibility for that, then the information available to steam is going to be limited.
In fairness Steam and many games do provide quite detailed logs. But they can only really log things they can control. If they get a message from the OS (like “disk write error"), all they can do is log that. It just doesn’t necessarily even have the permissions or access to that level of the OS to provide the “why”, just that essentially “computer said no”.
That’s true, but it could still be more specific.
For example there’s a comment about symlinks on exFAT. Steam could say “failed to create symbolic link” instead of “disk write error” in that case.
There typically are a few different error conditions for normal writes too that Steam could pass on. E.g. on Linux there are separate errors for out of quota, files becoming too large for the fs they’re on, the fs being out of space, and low-level I/O errors.
I used to have it on Windows on certain patches but never on CachyOS. Often with blue screens. I say certain patches because it would keep happening a lot until I updated Windows. One time the system wouldn‘t recognize my disc drive until I unplugged and replugged it. That stuck with me.
Yes OS errors can be vague, but no, you’re not going to just get “disk error error” for such disparate errors.
Do a search for “errno”, and specifically the POSIX error section. There are separate errors for “permission denied”, “device unavailable”, “bad file descriptor”, etc. Windows API calls have a whole host of their own error codes, plus functions to examine what’s going wrong specifically.
This is most likely caused by a higher layer in the code catching errors when it doesn’t know what to do with them, and then just showing a generic message.
So all of that is probably technically true.
If Steam can’t write to the disk for any reason, all it can say is there is a disk write error.
But it’s [current year]. I’m sure we as mankind and GabeN in particular could figure something out to make meaningful error messages from the OS through steam, to the user a reality.
Everything my computer does or any other machine, should align with me so I can use it. That’s the point. I want human readable error messages. I want buttons that are big enough for me to touch and I want an instruction manual in a language I can read. Or a good picture based one.
For example. It could be that there is not enough disk space. It could be a permission issue and it could be some hardware failure. Either of those would help me.
Over 6300 pages when you search for “woke”. And talk on the Steam forums using that word has made the forums unusable. Also talk about Steam charts for games where it doesn’t matter, but I’d blame live service developers for that more than Valve.
Between the anti-woke conspiracism and the outright racism, transphobia and general bigotry, I don’t know how anyone can use those forums for anything. Genuinely the most toxic and hate-filled forums I’ve ever used in my 30-odd years of internetting.
I look up game info on the steam forums several times a week, and I have found them significantly less contentious than lemmy. I don’t remember ever seeing a “woke” thread. I assume it’s because it’s largely contained to AAA games and I’m usually playing indie games?
In any case I think it’s an exaggeration to call them “unusable”.
It ain’t a conspiracy… Biggest genuinely just don’t like what they perceive as woke. It is legitimately that shallow. There’s no new ones there’s no gotcha there’s no conspiracy. It’s just a bunch of assholes being assholes.
It’s not a conspiracy, they really don’t like woke, see new Gears of War, Dragon Age, Concord
I mean, what more do you want from the error? Time? Location? Directory that failed the write? Sector count? It’s pretty straightforward.
Every error steam has given me was easily figured out in the logs. Just like every program.
What you’re not understanding is how hard it is for an operating system to diagnose a problem with a drive.
You’re expecting from Stream they write a full diagnostics tool so the program can figure out what went wrong, which could range from permission issues or formatting, to failing sectors/drives.
In theory you could make something that works, in reality you’ll be getting false positives, for example: a permission error message while it’s actually a physical write error. The ‘wrong’ message is worse than a ‘vague’ message.
Disk write error.
Almost like the error has something to do with writing to the disk.
As in the disk may have an error in which Steam cannot write to it.
What else is Steam supposed to say? it’s literally pointing to the error, it can’t do anything else. If you don’t know how to pour through logs or anything that’s okay, that’s what Geek Squad is for
Every error steam has given me was easily figured out in the logs.
Wouldn’t it be better if the error message itself helped you figure it out, so that you don’t have to look into logs? People seriously underestimate useful information in a good error message. Stuff like “Windows encountered an unexpected error” are just not useful.
How is “disk write error” not a meaningful message? It means there was an error writing data to the disk.
So what the issue with my car?
Well it doesn’t start up
Not bashing on Steam, to be clear, but this error will not help fix the issue, user actually needs to investigate one of the many reasons this could be.
A meaningful error may be: write failed because files are locked by process xy.
I dont think Windows gives that information to Steam.
One of the “disk write error” I encountered, is the absence of symbolic link in a file system.
I pluged a used TF card (formatted as exFAT) into my Steam Deck. It works most of the time, but one day I installed a game packed by AppImage, and Steam reported “disk write error”. Turned out exFAT doesn’t support symbolic links, and AppImage uses symbolic links to resolve DLL dependencies.
If I had two wishes, I would like a community tool to share configs to make games work that require tweaking.
So something like Protondb but that actually assembles or merges config files? Sounds interesting.
When I had those it turned out I had bad RAM
How did you arrive at that count?
Because the link is just a Steam forum search result for "disk write error". There are over 2000 pages of results. OP doesn't have a story.
Click the link. Its the number of pages for the search result in Steam forums.
Thanks. I didn’t notice that there was a link.
OP didn’t surround the phrase with quotes (and I don’t know if Steam’s search knows what to do with quoted phrases anyway). So most of those pages will be full of posts that contain those words but not that phrase.
purplemonkeymad@programming.dev 58 minutes ago
Just wanted to point out that this search is for over a decade of questions. It might be a problem, but over 10 years you are likely to get a sizeable result for a lot of errors.
it_depends_man@lemmy.world 15 minutes ago
That is true, but it also shows that this issue has gone on for over a decade and not been solved.