Broken downloads breaks steam

[MajorFoley]

So quite frankly this is an issue ive been suffering for the last 6 bloody months in 2 different forms
the First time whenever i tried to see the downloads page id get some undefined error with an error code.
The second one is now a black screen and if i try to check it i cant even view my library of games without resetting steam to fix it.

The only fix i have found and its extremely temporary is delete my appcache and reset. This fixes it for maybe 3-6 hours before the crap starts again. Any ideas?

[Silicon Vampire]

This really does sound like a storage device issue, not necessarily with the device you see the issue... but probably so.

I have seen odd things like this occurring with a flaky controller board on another drive, even a cd/dvd/blue ray drive causing issues with another storage device. That was difficult to find.

[crunchyfrog]

Nguyên văn bởi Silicon Vampire:

This really does sound like a storage device issue, not necessarily with the device you see the issue... but probably so.

I have seen odd things like this occurring with a flaky controller board on another drive, even a cd/dvd/blue ray drive causing issues with another storage device. That was difficult to find.

Yup it's where I'd start first of all I think.

These sorts of things can be right bastards to find as you say (especially if they're temperamental).

Hopefully the have abash and get back to us for further help

[Iceira]

Thats becuase ppl dont know how haddisk work they mixup seek time for free space with DL speed, because they can feel the lost speed then disk was 50%empty and now they dont know what happend, and it dont help then user say 1tb disk, thats last decad biggest disk no matter if that is a SSD or RPM disk , maybe im to nice here, even some SSD is not that fast as other from the past.

we have told this so many times , then you hit last 200gb you can feel a lost performance its diffrent then it happend on every brand and model ( cache size matter on my old WD 1,6TB its was apox 160gb, then its felt like someone drop a anchor and drag it around on the I/O task then it write to disk( wasteing to much time looking for free pocket to write in and and time defragmentation matter , but in the end still same problem no free room, and yes we are tired of explan this, and turn this around you did not have the issue then disk was new and empty.
no steam user has ever complain over it there, you need a faulthy disk or cable for that to happend.

i have said it so many times, im sure some day steam will make a "resevation disk pool size that warn people becausesteam users they will never learn "how things actual work" they are gamers not harddisk technician, then its dayli that steam user keep ask this, then its a problem, there is a diffrence in other that know better and casual pc gamer.

there is nothing wrong with what you dont know , problem is system aient going to tell you this anymore. thats user own problem , and now its been seen steam problem. all disk samller then 2TB is the issue and lack of respect with 10% free rule that was seen as recommedation in the old previous OS = 200gb kept free , lost disk performance then you do and it still stands today and we will never get ride of it.

this is know by many previous windows system users, and that rule was removed because TB disk larger then 2TB that 10% rule look like a joke. 10TB thats 1TB kept free % dont work

im pretty sure most here can see a issue looking for free space on 10tb then lesser then 1TB free left disk system is in trouble ( aka lost disk performance. )

ps.
and thats why steam might in the furture make a popup warning then ppl install, you run out of space and your pc performance can be effect by this in DL to write and its all about disk throughput. in I/O

this is common knowledge for harddisk experts.

[MajorFoley]

Nguyên văn bởi crunchyfrog:

Nguyên văn bởi MajorFoley:

Its more like it wont load period. Before it was just a black screen, it literally came up with an error code before that. Something like "cannot read property 'disconnect' of undefinied" After a patch that released a week or 2 ago it just became a black screen so yeah.

If that's the case then it might be worth using CrystalMark to do an intensive disk scan to see if your hard drive has any faults.

If you've had an update it could simply have written that to a part of thedrive playing up and bingo, there's your issue.

So yeah, get an intensive disck scan done even if just to discount that issue.

Hmm last i checked they were all fine but that was a few months ago... man i regret deleting apps at times, its the crystaldiskmark info one right? I don't really remember how to scan with that only that it checks the health of the drives. Which last i checked were all healthy

For the record guys steams main EXE is installed on my OS drive, which is a NVME SSD guess i should have mentioned that. And i have a steam library on the OS drive for only a select few games that i tend to switch around, 1 HDD a 4TB WD black HDD as well as another library on a Samsung EVO SATA SSD 1TB

EDIT not trying to bark up the wrong tree but can it be something like windows directx Shader cache that could potentially be an issue under those temporary files?

[crunchyfrog]

Nguyên văn bởi MajorFoley:

Nguyên văn bởi crunchyfrog:

If that's the case then it might be worth using CrystalMark to do an intensive disk scan to see if your hard drive has any faults.

If you've had an update it could simply have written that to a part of thedrive playing up and bingo, there's your issue.

So yeah, get an intensive disck scan done even if just to discount that issue.

Hmm last i checked they were all fine but that was a few months ago... man i regret deleting apps at times, its the crystaldiskmark info one right? I don't really remember how to scan with that only that it checks the health of the drives. Which last i checked were all healthy

For the record guys steams main EXE is installed on my OS drive, which is a NVME SSD guess i should have mentioned that. And i have a steam library on the OS drive for only a select few games that i tend to switch around, 1 HDD a 4TB WD black HDD as well as another library on a Samsung EVO SATA SSD 1TB

EDIT not trying to bark up the wrong tree but can it be something like windows directx Shader cache that could potentially be an issue under those temporary files?

No very unlikely. Shader caches have always been a thing, it's just now it's displayed under downloads so you SEE them happening.

They're just small files to do with well, shader pre-caching in games so very unlikely to do anything like this.

Yes Crystaldisk is for health checking, but it'll give you a start. If it reports anything you can then do further scanning using a different utility if you wish.

[MajorFoley]

Nguyên văn bởi crunchyfrog:

Nguyên văn bởi MajorFoley:

Hmm last i checked they were all fine but that was a few months ago... man i regret deleting apps at times, its the crystaldiskmark info one right? I don't really remember how to scan with that only that it checks the health of the drives. Which last i checked were all healthy

For the record guys steams main EXE is installed on my OS drive, which is a NVME SSD guess i should have mentioned that. And i have a steam library on the OS drive for only a select few games that i tend to switch around, 1 HDD a 4TB WD black HDD as well as another library on a Samsung EVO SATA SSD 1TB

EDIT not trying to bark up the wrong tree but can it be something like windows directx Shader cache that could potentially be an issue under those temporary files?

No very unlikely. Shader caches have always been a thing, it's just now it's displayed under downloads so you SEE them happening.

They're just small files to do with well, shader pre-caching in games so very unlikely to do anything like this.

Yes Crystaldisk is for health checking, but it'll give you a start. If it reports anything you can then do further scanning using a different utility if you wish.

I'll get samsung magician loaded and whatever WD uses for checking the health of the drives. But according to crystaldisk everything looks fine. Might take me a few day though will have to be AFK for a bit.

[crunchyfrog]

Nguyên văn bởi MajorFoley:

Nguyên văn bởi crunchyfrog:

No very unlikely. Shader caches have always been a thing, it's just now it's displayed under downloads so you SEE them happening.

They're just small files to do with well, shader pre-caching in games so very unlikely to do anything like this.

Yes Crystaldisk is for health checking, but it'll give you a start. If it reports anything you can then do further scanning using a different utility if you wish.

I'll get samsung magician loaded and whatever WD uses for checking the health of the drives. But according to crystaldisk everything looks fine. Might take me a few day though will have to be AFK for a bit.

Well do get back to us. Problems like this can be a right pain in the arse.

[MajorFoley]

Ok so good news some more good news and then some crappy news. Good news my drives are fine. Even better good news an actual uninstall of steam does seem to fix the issue as opposed to deleting everything but steam.exe and steam apps. Bad news is that when i copy over my older installation it becomse messed up again so there is 100% a setting there thats messing it up. I have no idea which of these folders could be messing it up but theres the gist. I have screenshots of my settings so thats fine. The other stuff i need to worry about is my sceenshots (i already have that folder saved) and my controller settings i think. Other than that i think everything else can potentially go?

EDIT: problems returned so doing this some easy way without actually deleting my libraries i renamed them on the other drives so that steam loses them. Despite the HDD being healthy it looks like one of the huge libraries is causing the issue despite there being sufficient disk space. I'm going to run a few more tests but like you guys said might have to trim the damn thing down. Shouldn't be too hard bunch for games i don't play anymore and gotta get rid of the hoarder mindset now that i actually have decent net...

[crunchyfrog]

I have to question HOW you're doing this.

What you should be doing when installing or copying to a new drive is this:

First off install download Steam anew and install it on your new drive.

Then copy across both your steamapps folder contents (or the games you wish to) plus the appmanifest files.

It should then start seeing them when you run Steam.

[MajorFoley]

Nguyên văn bởi crunchyfrog:

I have to question HOW you're doing this.

What you should be doing when installing or copying to a new drive is this:

First off install download Steam anew and install it on your new drive.

Then copy across both your steamapps folder contents (or the games you wish to) plus the appmanifest files.

It should then start seeing them when you run Steam.

I pretty much wiped steam off my C drive, my other libraries werent affected because they are extras not my main one. Then reinstalled a fresh copy of steam from the installer you get from their website. I added my other SSD library by browsing to it in the downloads section of the settings, and the downloads section was still working when i added it. I then tried adding my F drive library and the issue came back again. (Also halved the folder size of that library before doing so (so about a TB) by moving not much played games to an external for testing to make sure it wasn't a storage issue like some others have mentioned which unfortunately also did not work)

The moment i remove the F: drive library it works again. Theres something in that library folder thats causing the issue but i got no idea. If i keep both my SSD libraries works fine its only the HDD one that seems to have the issue. Maybe a corrupted download/file in there somewhere?

Also double checked fragmentation/trim and the like, its set to weekly which i guess is its default setting so its definitely not an issue there.. At least i've nailed it down somewhat...