The "Add Drive" button when adding a new library is not working.

[smackafish]

I was trying to add a new NVME drive to use as a new steam library folder. When I hit the "Add Drive" button, nothing happens, and the whole steam client goes into a non-working state. I have observed the following when it happens:

- The menu buttons no longer work (e.g. when you exit "Settings", it won't go back in if you click it again)
- When viewing the game library, if you click on a game, you only get a spinning steam logo.
- To recover from this, I had to shut down Steam from task manager and restart it, then everything is back to normal.

I have 2 PCs, both running Windows 10, and both are seeing the same thing. I got one on Beta, and one non-beta. Got the same problem on the Beta release as well:

Steam Version: 1697233589
Steam Client Build Date: Fri, Oct 13 5:58 PM UTC -08:00
Steam Web Build Date: Fri, Oct 13 4:56 PM UTC -08:00
Steam API Version: SteamClient020

The other PC is running the latest non-beta release. I tried to uninstall/reinstall one of the Steam clients, and the problem still persists and now unable to add my steam library after the re-install.

Please advise.

[smackafish]

I found the problem.

Turned out the drives do show up, but was taking a long time. The reason was I have a couple of network drives that were inaccessible and think Steam was scanning the shared drives along with the hard drives, and the shares that were inaccessible were contributing to drive list taking so long to populate. After removing the problematic shared drives, the "Add Drive" button started working normally.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

It really needs to throw some errors when that happens. It can be annoying, right?

[macwinux]

I found this topic via Google and I know this is a bit old but I just want to confirm OP's observation.

In my case, I had an aging internal drive and it's taking a long time (even Disk Management) to scan it. After about 10 minutes or so the Add Drive button finally populated the list and I was able to install to another drive.

My suggestion to Valve is to let the Steam client partially populate the drive list (show the most responsive drives first), then have something to indicate that it's still scanning the rest of the drives so that if the target drive is in that initial list then the user can use it but still allows for an option to wait for the slower internal/network drives.

[Wren]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.