Fix: Steam Disk Write Error

When installing or updating a steam game, the console displays an error message as follows:

• An error has occurred while installing [game title].
• An error has occurred while updating [game title].

This is a very common error which occurs when steam is unable to perform complete installation or updating. There may be many different reasons behind this depending on the problem your PC encountered. The most commonly suggested solution is to delete steam and download the entire content (including games) again. Although this method should work just fine, it is actually quite a hard measure and takes a lot of time. There is no need to resort to this solution if a simpler one works for you.

Solution 1: Change Steam Settings

Before advancing to advanced trouble shooting, we will change Steam’s settings to see if the problem gets fixed. One of the basic things you can do is change the download region.

The Steam content system is divided into different regions. The client automatically detects your region through your network and sets it as default. Sometimes, servers in a specific region may be overloaded or may be going through a hardware failure. Therefore changing the download region may solve the problem in question.

1. Open Steam and click ‘Settings’ on the drop down menu in the upper left corner of the window.
2. Select ‘Downloads’ and navigate to ‘Download Region’.
3. Select other regions other than your own and restart Steam.

Solution 2: Check Firewalls

If changing the download region didn’t work, we can check your existing firewalls to see if they are disabling steam to write on the hard drive. Head over to your installed firewall and disable it. Restart steam and start the update/download again.

Solution 3: Check Directory Permissions

1. Exit steam and navigate to your Steam directory (C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam). If you have chosen a custom location for the installation, navigate there.
2. Make sure that the directory is not “Read-only”.
3. Right click on your Steam launcher and ‘Run as administrator’.

This solution ensures that your steam directory hasn’t been marked as Read-only because of potential corrupt update or installation. After ensuring that it isn’t, running the application as administrator will give it privileges to write to the disk again; hence the problem will be solved.

Solution 4: flushconfig

1. Press the ⊞ Win(windows) + R key to bring up the run window.
2. In the dialogue bar type steam://flushconfig.
3. A dialogue will appear asking you to proceed with the command or cancel. Click Yes.
   
4. After you press ‘OK’, Steam will restart and hopefully, the problem will be solved. This command resets the configuration of Steam and when you re-enter Steam, every setting will be set as default.

Solution 5: Check Corrupt Files

If these two methods don’t work for you, we can troubleshoot which file went corrupt/missing and try re-download the entire file again.

1. Exit steam and navigate to your Steam directory (C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam). If you have chosen a custom location for the installation, navigate there.
2. Move to the folder ‘logs’ and open ‘txt’.
3. Move to the bottom of the text file and search for recent errors.

An example of an error is this:

[2017-04-12 12:47:31] [AppID 346110] Update canceled: File commit failed: failed to move unchanged file “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\workshop\content\346110\570371714\LinuxNoEditor\NPC\Female\Assets\Nude\Nude_Human_Female_Body_D.uasset.z.uncompressed_size” (Disk write failure)

The number written first in the URL is your APPID, in this case (346110) is the AppID for ARK Survival Evolved.

4. Navigate to the root folder of the mod, in this case, it is 570371714. It has no specific file size as the root folders of different games may vary.
5. Restart steam and move to the downloads folder. Here you will notice that Steam will be asking for an update for the game. Update the necessary files and you’ll be good to go.

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