Fallout 4 Appears Uninstalled and Steam Does Not Recognize Available Disk Space

[yinepuhotep]

I have Fallout 4 installed on my system, and have had for close to a year. Suddenly, a little over a week ago, Steam decided that the game was not installed, and when I tried the usual tricks recommended for getting Steam to recognize the installation and validate the files, Steam announced that my 2TB hard drive, with 100GB of free space on it, was out of disk space so it could not install FO4 on the drive. OR ANY OTHER DRIVE ON MY SYSTEM.

Yes, I have several drives, either 1TB or 2TB, and I attempted to install FO4 on every one of them, and Steam told me that every one of my drives, from the one with 70GB of free space to the one with nearly 200GB of free space, was too full to install FO4 on my system. I even tried plugging in a brand new 2TB drive (that I plan to install Linux on later), and Steam said that the drive with 2TB of free space is too full to install FO4.

In an attempt to test and discover whether there might be something outside of Steam that's interfering, I tried installing some games that I have purchased but not installed yet, and Steam installs lthem without a hitch, including games which take up more space than FO4.

So, I'm fairly sure that there's something either in Steam or in FO4 that's causing the problem, but when I went through Customer Service, they're telling me that it must be something outside of Steam that's causing the problem. What could it be, if not either Steam or the game I purchased through Steam, downloaded and installed via Steam, and (up until a week or so ago) played via Steam?

Since this debacle, and Customer Services utterly usefless response, I've had to create a desktop shortcut that leads direclty to the game launcher and bypasses Steam, but that's not going to help the next time Bethesda releases an update and I can't download it because of Steam.

Can anyone make suggestions that Customer Service seems unable to?

[The Giving One]

Are any of those drives external drives or did you originally have FO4 installed to an internal hard drive ?

EDIT..........

Important:

It is not recommended that you install Steam to an external hard drive, due to potential performance issues.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7418-YUBN-8129

Installed games are appearing as uninstalled

Preventing this issue

External Hard Drives

External hard drives are not recommended for use with Steam or Steam's games. Aside from many potential performance issues, external hard drives may connect or disconnect from the computer at inopportune times as part of their normal operations. If you encounter this issue with an external drive, install Steam and your games to an internal drive instead.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8379-RYIP-2998

[yinepuhotep]

No. All of my hard drives are INTERNAL. I've noticed that external hard drives are really only good for saving files, and should NEVER be used for installing any sooftware unless it's designed to be portable.

[The Giving One]

Go to the Fallout 4 game folder found in the Steam\steamapps\common folder. Open it up. Are there files there ?

LOTS of files ?

Now, back out and check for the appmanifest (.acf) file for FO4 and be sure you see it in that folder. It is the one with the same number as FO4 has on the Steam store page in the URL for the game.

Post the model numbr and model of the computer. If custom built, the motherboard instead.

Post the operating system.

Post if the operating system is 32 or 64 bit.

It's not Steam or FO4. Otherwise, everyone would have this problem. Also, do you have any mods installed for the game FO4 at all ?

[yinepuhotep]

Given that, as I said previously, I can play the game from a link directly to the launcher, Yes, there are files there. Be kind of hard to play the game if there weren't game files.

Motherboard = Sabertooh 990FX
OS = Windows 8.1 64 bit

Yes, I have mods. Quite a few, mostly acqquqired directly from the Bethesda mod collection.

Once again, the problem is that STEAM thinks the game is not installed, even though it is on the hard drive, has not changed from one day to the next, and I am able to play the game by opening the game launcher directly.
On top of that, STEAM says that Fallout 4 - and ONLY Fallout 4 - is too large to fit on any of my hard drives, including a brand new 2TB drive.I know that it's ONLY Fallout 4, because I have installed OTHER games, some larger than FO4, on the same disks that STEAM says are too small for FO4 to fit on them.
If I had some way to install FO4 without using Steam, I would attempt it, but the fact that Steam can install games that take more disk space without any trouble, Implies that there is something broken between Steam and FO4.

Looking at the manifest files, I MAY have found part of the problem. The manifest file for FO4 is corrupted. Going to attempt to delete it and let Steam create a new manifest.

[yinepuhotep]

Thank you for mentioning the manifest files. Once I deleted the corrupt manifest file, Steam was able to reinstall FO4.

[yinepuhotep]

Another detail that I wouldn't have known about if I hadn't kept asking questions of Steam Support is that Fallout 4 requqires around twice its installed disk space to install, reinstall, or update the game, because Bethesda wrote the game so that it downloads all the game files, decompresses them into a separate temporary directory, and then copies them over to the install directory, thus using twice as much disk space as the game's final installation size.