WORKAROUND: Steam Deck boot stuck at "Verifying Installation..." or "Checking for available updates..."

[strainedl0ve]

Hi all,

Posting this here as I encountered this bug a few days ago whilst traveling.
Hopefully this will be of help to someone else.

Upon boot, Steam OS was stuck into "Verifying Installation..."
I tried to boot into the boot manager and select the older system image, but that did not solve the problem, as the boot ended up being stuck to a similar screen that said "Checking for available updates...".

I contacted Valve support and their "solution" was to re-image the deck.
However to me that did not make sense, so I dug a little more and was finally able to find somewhat of a workaround.

When booting from the boot manager, it's possible to follow the base Linux OS boot sequence, and after looking at it it was quite clear that the issue was not with the base OS itself, but with the Steam launcher in gaming mode.

Apparently there is an assumption that Steam requires an active internet connection in order to properly boot up in a large number of situations, when either updates are pending or some changes to steam configuration are made.
This means that if there is no connection available, Steam will be stuck in a startup loop in a number of scenarios.
Which in itself is nuts, but ok. Let's move on.

The workaround was booting via the live USB Steam OS recovery image, chrooting into the local steam OS partition via one of the recovery tools from the terminal command line and forcing the deck to boot into desktop instead of gaming mode

After you boot the live recovery image, you will have a few options on the desktop, if you choose to open the recovery tools, you will be presented with a terminal window.
From here you can run the recovery tool as follows:

`sudo ./tools/repair_device.sh chroot`

This will mount the steam deck OS partition to the live environment and chroot into it, allowing you to run commands inside your Steam OS installation.
Next you have to disable read-only mode:

`steamos-readonly disable`

and then run the following command:

`steamos-session-select plasma-persistent`

This will force the steam deck to boot directly into desktop mode (KDE Plasma), bypassing the Steam launcher.
If you run it without the `-persistent` suffix, it will work only for the next boot, but in this case it won't be of help.

After this, remember to exit from the chroot with the following command:

`exit`

Then you can reboot the deck, which should boot into the Linux desktop instead of trying to load Steam.

Once you boot into KDE Plasma you will see that Steam fails to start up due to lack of internet connection which prevents updates.
In theory this process could be done with any live Linux image, but you have to know what you are doing, so using the Steam OS recovery image is better.

Apparently there might be another way to do it for the current boot session without the use of a live USB, by interrupting the boot process via Ctrl+Alt+F3 and forcing boot to plasma using the same command, but I haven't tried to see if it actually works.

Anyways, this is an ugly workaround that is not well documented, in fact, at all!

Moreover, the fact that Steam Deck, a console designed for portability, requires an active internet connection to boot successfully is a very serious UX bug that will not be easily solvable by non-technical users.
Apparently it's a long-standing issue as well so I really hope that Valve fixes this ASAP!
I have reported this, so hopefully they will fix it. Let's see.

Lastly, re-imaging is not a guaranteed solution to this problem as often the new OS install will attempt to update upon fresh boot. Hence this will unnecessarily delete all user data while not resolving the issue.
I would really hope that Valve support gets a bit better in the future, they could have given me a workaround, since it does exist.


Cheers folks

[BARACK OBAMA]

lol any advice on how to proceed if you're traveling and don't have the ability to boot from USB or even to plug in a keyboard and mouse?