Errors running or updating games after moving steam from one drive to another

[stargoo]

This isn't a question. I'm going to share what I found worked for me after much searching and trying different things.

If you have recently moved your steam installation from one drive to another (let's say you've found it doesn't run too well with your games on your SSD so you've just installed a big shiny new HDD). You've followed the instructions in the Steam support for moving your installation, and almost all your games work perfectly from your new drive.

But not quite all of them. Some games don't run, you get the dreaded "disk write error" when you try to run them or update them. Or they are stuck in an endless cycle of downloading updates and installing them, but never finishing. Or the progress bar is flashing between 0% and 100% on one game and you can't make it stop. Or you might notice that when you open the game properties it shows that the game is still on the old drive.

You've tried the standard Steam-approved solution of deleting everything from your Steam folder except SteamApps, UserData and Steam.exe and it still didn''t fix it. Now what?

1. Open the folder where steam is installed.
   
2. Go to the Logs folder and open Content_log.txt
   
3. Start from the bottom and work your way up to find any errors. It should show you the file that has the error and the AppID number (generally a 4 or 5 digit number). There might be more than one file triggering an error. Take a note of all of these. Check the time in the left hand column against when you tried to run the game if you aren't sure which lines might contain the error.

If the file path is in the correct location then it might be caused by the Read Only flag being set. Search for "Steam disk write error" on YouTube, there are a number of tutorials that talk through how to fix this.

But if the file path shows the old drive, then this is what you need to do.

There is an easy fix and a complicated fix. Try the easy one first, if that doesn't work then you'll need to try the complicated one. The easy one worked for me with Garry's Mod, but I needed to do the complicated one for Train Simulator 2015.

Easy fix:

1. Exit Steam
   
2. Find the AppManifest file. It will be in the SteamApps directory, and will include the AppID at the end. For example, GM is 4000, so the file is SteamApps\AppManifest_4000.acf
   
3. Open it in a text editor that shows the information on separate lines (I used NotePad++)
   
4. Change the install path from the old path to the new one. It might have double backslashes; make sure you keep it in the same format.
   
5. Restart Steam
   
6. Try playing / updating the game again.

With a bit of luck this will fix it! Awesome, you're good to go.

But if it doesn't fix it, have a look at the AppManifest file again, it may have reverted back to the incorrect drive. If this is the case you can try the complicated fix.

Complicated fix: (if the easy fix doesn't work)

1. Exit Steam
   
2. Rename the game folder in SteamApps\Common (eg. add an X to the end)
   
3. If it also exists in the Downloading folder:
   Rename the game folder in SteamApps\Downloading (eg. add an X to the end)
   Zip all of the files named SteamApps\Downloading\state_{a bunch of numbers}_{AppID}.patch then delete the original files
   I use winrar, but 7zip or even Windows' built-in Send To Compressed Folder will do the trick.
   
4. Open Steam and uninstall the game from Steam (right click, delete local content)
   
5. Exit Steam
   
6. Rename all the folders back and extract the zipped files if you needed to do that step.
   
7. Open Steam, click on the game in your games library and click on Install.

That should do it! You should see it searching for pre-existing files and then hopefully picking up where it left off and running / downloading / installing the game.

If that doesn't fix it, then sorry, I don't know what else to suggest. But if you find anything else that works please post it here and you might be able to help someone else out.