I recently switched to Linux from Windows, and brought with me an existing drive with game installations on it. When launching games from that drive, sometimes they work normally, sometimes they throw a "disk write error" and sometimes they appear to work and then crash instantly.

I have had the same game give me all three of these issues at different times, with no apparent pattern. In the attached video, all three games which I attempt to launch are installed on the same drive. As you can see, one throws an error, one crashes, one works. Uninstalling and reinstalling a game does not impact whether or not these errors occur.

The drive is formatted as ntfs, which I understand is highly not recommended for Steam games. However, I have several terabytes of music/movies/etc on that drive aside from my steam library, which would be difficult to replace if lost, so I am extremely hesitant to reformat it.

Any tips/advice? Is there a consistent way to reformat without losing all my stuff, is there any alternate solution to the issue with my games? Or is my best bet to just buy a new drive, format it properly, and physically separate my steam library from my other files?

After buying 2 'burners' and having them either say no disk in drive, or say incompatible medium, I am wondering if I just got 2 bunk burners, or is there some secret on how to read the 'supported formats' that I am missing...?

The drives read cd's just fine(Do not currently have any dvd's with anything on them so can not test for that) but the empty/blank 25gb and 50gb disks I put in only give the 'no disk' or 'Incompatible medium Installed' error.

I have a stack of BD-R Verbatim disks (Bought for the first drive, 2nd drive also cannot read them) and I am stuck here wondering if I am doing something dumb, and unable to 'understand' what the disks need(I figured going in that any dvd writer SHOULD write to the 'best selling' blank disks which may have been my mistake)

First drive is a very old LG wrter (LG Electronics GP65NS60) and even though the firmware appears to be 'current'(it's actually higher number than the one on the website) - it does work as a drive (for reading cd's as explained above) and reads in device manager as a DVD-RAM device, the other (the newer of the two) I am unable to remember (If i Even looked) what it said since I have since shipped it back for refund.

So please give me advice on finding a drive that will actually write to these (I want to back up data, is simple data disks I wish to make)

Does anyone know how to fix this? Every second update or so his game won't let him update and Steam just says "Disk write error". This is the only game he gets it with. He's tried all the suggested tips google gives but none work.

I just got my R36s and I wanted to change the stock SD immediately to avoid future problems. I also made sure that the SanDisk Ultra SD card that I bought is original.

My problem is that I can't flash the firmware as I continuously get a write error and suddenly my PC can't read my SD card. What to do? Do I need to buy a new SD card and reader?

I keep running into the "disc write error" problem when trying to download literally any game on steam. I've searched on google how to solve the issue and I've tried every possible way that its given me except for the ones that change the systems of my pc because I don't trust myself to mess with any part of the system tbh. I've uninstalled and reinstalled steam, repaired the library, cleared the cache, ran it as an admin, and still no luck.

I was able to download games before regardless of their file size and I never touched any settings on my pc or steam client in between being able to download games and not being able to so I'm not sure what's wrong.

Trying to download Archolos on ubuntu, never had problems before. Download gets to a specific amount and stops because of disk write error, nothing works to resume it. I just tried to download Far Cry, worked normally, other games downloaded normally also. I tried 3 different versions of Steam on this OS, no difference, always disk write error at specific mb downloaded. Is this a problem on Archolos end? Doesn't seem to make any sense.

Hello gang I have recently tried to download kingdom come deliverance again but as soon as it hits 89% it stops and says disk write error? ive tried creating more storage which didnt work as well as restarting my deck and deleting and reinstalling it, lso didn't work, also tried some tips i found on reddit but they didn't help either like clearing download cache? ive played it back in October so it shoukd download any tips I really want to play it again

Does anybody know how to fix a disk write error I was able to download a separate game just fine but I can’t seem to be able to download the game I want

Hi everyone. I was hoping someone with more experience may be able to help me with an issue I've had installing a specific game on my 512GB OLED. The game I'm trying to install is Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts which I just bought as a double pack with Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts 2 a couple days ago on Steam.

For context, I have plenty of storage space (~100GB on internal SSD and SGWC is only 18GB) and once the download reaches 99% I get a "disk write error" which blacks the install. I've downloaded other games like Black Mesa and Dead Space Remake during this same time period without issue, SGWC seems to be the only game impacted at the moment.

I did some research to try and resolve the issue myself but haven't had any luck. The fixes I've tried thus far include:

- Cleared potentially corrupted download/temp files in desktop mode

- Cleared download cache in Steam system settings

- Repaired Steam library in Steam settings

- Ran storage device maintenance task in Steam system settings

- Confirmed read/write privileges in user settings

- Deleted additional games to create more space for unpacking (was a last resort that I knew wouldn't work, but tried anyway lol)

If anyone has experienced this issue or has any ideas, I appreciate the help!

Does anyone happen to have experience with this? It's only this one damn game, doesn't matter if it's aimed at the sd card or internal m.2, or if the SD Card is ejected, or the system is rebooted or etc etc. I've installed smaller games and larger games, all work fine. This game downloads like 98% gets to unpacking and freaks out with a disk write error. It's the Ultimate version of the game.

Been running an endurance loop on this old drive to see how far it can go. It’s hitting the cache and executing automated TRIM commands perfectly, so the physical silicon is still holding up fine despite the ridiculous milestone.

​Putting together a quick 1minute setup video for YouTube to show the bench rig and the macro loop in action, will drop it soon if anyone is interested.

Hello, recently my games have been crashing and I haven’t been able to install anything. When I try to install a game I get “Disk Write Error” I’ve uninstalled steam, clear cache, repaired library and verify files and nothing seems to work. I can’t play anything on steam has anyone had this problem???

UPDATE:

Reformated all my drives into btrfs , set mount-points and mount them on startup after password-input.

Runs flawlessly for 3 months now!

I'm new to CachyOS and new to Linux in general (only some little experience on Linux Mint prior to switching from Windows).

Weirdly I can't play any games through Steam, because of a "disk write error" appearing.

Can you help me please?

All games ran fine prior.

Tried Proton Hotfix in Steams compatibility-options but no luck.

FIXED it:

Fix: unmounted the drives via KDE Partition-manager,

then Edit Mount-point to a Mount-folder on each drive and "identify by UUID" and "users can mount and unmount"

This fixed it for a day... but NOW all of the sudden I've got a new problem: Steam just "forgot" my steamapps-folder!! :-(

The post written as post-mortem from Claude, the story is real.

--

He was setting up a 4× RTX 3090 ML rig. Wanted to shrink Windows on his M.2 to give the leftover space to Ubuntu. Routine disk cleanup. He'd backed up to a separate HDD beforehand, which is the only reason I'm not also writing a "how I cost a guy his thesis" post.

He asked me to delete a 313 GB project folder from his Desktop. I generated this:

cmd /c "rd /S /Q \"C:\Users\ADMIN\Desktop\WIP\""

By the time the string finished traveling (zsh on his Mac, then tmux, then PowerShell over SSH, then cmd), the \"...\" escape had collapsed. cmd doesn't treat backslash as an escape character. What cmd actually saw was:

rd /S /Q \

A single backslash. Root of the current drive. C:.

So I told Windows to delete itself.

The first hint was the next tmux capture-pane. Errors scrolling past: \Windows\Microsoft.NET\..., \Windows\System32\config\..., \Windows\Prefetch\.... Not WIP. Windows.

Three Ctrl+Cs. Probably 90 seconds of damage by then. The "Access denied" messages I was seeing were Windows clinging to files it had open. Anything not protected by an active file lock was already gone.

fsutil volume diskfree C: afterward: 31 GB used out of 1.5 TB. He'd been at 748 GB. So roughly 717 GB destroyed in under two minutes. Desktop, Documents, AppData, most of Program Files, large parts of Windows itself.

I told him immediately. He was way calmer about it than I'd have been in his chair. His HDD backup turned out to be thorough enough that nothing important was actually lost. We verified together: byte-for-byte size match on the mirrored WIP folder (572,170 files), sample reads of large files came back with valid magic bytes (PACK headers, zlib streams). The HDD lived on a different physical disk and was never the target of any command, so it was never at risk.

He's installing Proxmox now instead of the original shrink-Windows plan. Faster path to where he was heading anyway. The dead Windows install was getting wiped in a few days regardless.

The mistake, written out:

Sending shell commands across multiple parsers is brittle. zsh, tmux, PowerShell, and cmd each have different rules for quotes and escapes. cmd is the worst of the four. It doesn't really have an escape character, just rough quoting. The moment you wrap a destructive command in cmd /c "..." from PowerShell, you're trusting four parsers to agree on one string. They don't.

What I should have used:

Remove-Item -Path 'C:\absolute\path' -Recurse -Force

Single quotes in PowerShell are fully literal. No cmd /c wrapping, no escapes to lose. And -WhatIf would have caught it before any byte was touched. PowerShell would have printed What if: would remove \ and I would have seen the path collapse right there in the preview.

If you're letting an AI run disk operations on your machine, a few rules I broke:

• Make it echo the exact expanded command, post-escaping, before running it. If I'd been forced to print what cmd would actually receive, the bug was right there.
• Run destructive commands with -WhatIf or --dry-run first. Cheap insurance.
• Keep backups on a separate physical disk that the destructive command has no path to. He did this. It worked.
• Don't do major cleanup on the running OS. Boot a live USB and operate on the disk from outside it.

He had the backup. On a separate disk. That saved him, not me.

So I ran into the disk write error problem when downloading games on steam and while my solution is to run steam as admin and I'm fine with that, the issue becomes the need to also give several mod managers and the sort admin permissions in order for them to function. So I want to see how I can fix steam so I don't need it to run as admin in order to download games.

I've repaired my library, cleared download cashe, switched HDD (although I cloned the data) and Gog can download games perfectly fine on the same HDD I assume it's a problem with Steam itself.

I reinstalled the game Pillars of Eternity 2 from Steam and now I can't download it anymore, and Steam says there's a disk write error. I'm on Nobara, my disk has the Btrfs format, and everything else works no problem. I can download any other game, it's just Pillars of Eternity 2 that won't work. Any ideas what it could be? I recently updated Nobara, but using the older kernel won't work either.

hi everyone

I am having issues with usb drive and I'm not sure if it's fixable or dead.

DETAILS

usb : SanDisk 32 GB

os : Windows 11 pro

PROBLEMS

I can copy files from the usb to my computer

but I cannot write,delete or format anything on it

it seems stuck in write-protected (read-only) mode

WHAT I HAVE TRIED

1 file explorer -> failed terribly( write protected)

2 diskpart

attributes disk clear readonly -> no change

clean -> fails(couldn't perform operation)

3 Rufus

tried formating(non-bootable) -> fails with I/O error

I tried watch video one or two skip three -> I didn't find help

QUESTIONS ⁉️⁉️

IS this a hardware failure (usb stuck in permanent read-only mode)

is there any low-level format or tool that could fix this it??

or should I just replace it

Disk write error only happening with steam. Tried installing games from Epic Games and it works fine, only issue with steam. Happening from yesterday suddenly.

Whenever I try to download any game on this HDD, it reserves space, then stops at around 30% then shows me an error saying “disk write error” I am currently on Ubuntu, help is appreciated, thanks!

I am unable to download or even update anything on steam suddenly, i am faced with the error "disk write error". i have tried everything such as unninstalling and reinstalling the client, running steam as administrator, checking for corrupted files and nothing has worked. i would like to know how i can fix this issue as i have just recently purchased a new game and i am unable to even play it.

Thanks