Post by @BananaTrifleViolin@piefed.world

2026-11-02 03:50 UTC

Disk Write Error is very much more likely to be a Windows (+/- Linux) error rather than a Steam error. If Steam can’t write to the disk for any reason, all it can say is there is a disk write error. It’s unlikely to know whether that’s due to the hard-drive failing or the hard drive going offline for some reason or even just a permissions error. I’m not surprised there are 2000 pages, because hard drive write failures are very common, and as the OS has responsibility for that, then the information available to steam is going to be limited. In fairness Steam and many games do provide quite detailed logs. But they can only really log things they can control. If they get a message from the OS (like “disk write error"), all they can do is log that. It just doesn’t necessarily even have the permissions or access to that level of the OS to provide the “why”, just that essentially “computer said no”.

Replies (4)

@setsubyou@lemmy.world 2026-11-02 06:53

That’s true, but it could still be more specific. For example there’s a comment about symlinks on exFAT. Steam could say “failed to create symbolic link” instead of “disk write error” in that case. There typically are a few different error conditions for normal writes too that Steam could pass on. E.g. on Linux there are separate errors for out of quota, files becoming too large for the fs they’re on, the fs being out of space, and low-level I/O errors.

Open ##5510582
@it_depends_man@lemmy.world 2026-11-02 06:55

So all of that is probably technically true. If Steam can’t write to the disk for any reason, all it can say is there is a disk write error. But it’s [current year]. I’m sure we as mankind and GabeN in particular could figure something out to make meaningful error messages from the OS through steam, to the user a reality. Everything my computer does or any other machine, should align with me so I can use it. That’s the point. I want human readable error messages. I want buttons that are big enough for me to touch and I want an instruction manual in a language I can read. Or a good picture based one. For example. It could be that there is not enough disk space. It could be a permission issue and it could be some hardware failure. Either of those would help me.

Open ##5510600
@zerofk@lemmy.zip 2026-11-02 08:03

Yes OS errors can be vague, but no, you’re not going to just get “disk error error” for such disparate errors. Do a search for “errno”, and specifically the POSIX error section. There are separate errors for “permission denied”, “device unavailable”, “bad file descriptor”, etc. Windows API calls have a whole host of their own error codes, plus functions to examine what’s going wrong specifically. This is most likely caused by a higher layer in the code catching errors when it doesn’t know what to do with them, and then just showing a generic message.

Open ##5511804
@CosmoNova@lemmy.world 2026-11-02 08:24

I used to have it on Windows on certain patches but never on CachyOS. Often with blue screens. I say certain patches because it would keep happening a lot until I updated Windows. One time the system wouldn‘t recognize my disc drive until I unplugged and replugged it. That stuck with me.

Open ##5512075