Steam "An error occurred while launching this game : Disk write error"

thatdeadmango · 2025-06-01 21:32:47

first and foremost: im decently new to Archlinux so please provide clear step by step instructions ;-;

I have looked through (to my knowledge) all the posts regarding this error and havent found a solution.

Here's the info you might need about my setup:

- Dualbooting Windows 11 and Arch linux

This is the output from lsblk -f:
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NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sda
├─sda1 vfat FAT32 CA84-CD05
├─sda2
├─sda3 ntfs CC369299369283DC
├─sda4 ntfs 78366BBF366B7D4E
├─sda5 vfat FAT32 9236-CEB1 802.7M 21% /boot
└─sda6 ext4 1.0 83278d8e-2d1c-452d-9ae8-715a5c8f4489 36.8G 33% /

sdb exfat 1.0 FreeSpace EABC-D500 931.2G 0% /mnt/FreeSpace

sdc
└─sdc1 exfat 1.0 QuickSpace B60C-9DBC 342.4G 26% /mnt/QuickSpace
zram0 swap 1 zram0 900721fd-2dcc-4495-9e39-5f244f8bc06c [SWAP]
________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Breakdown of this info:
- sda is my main 220 GB SSD that is used for both OSs and simple apps.

- sdb is my 1T HDD (that I will refer to as FreeSpace from now on) used for storing my art, files and games.

- sdc is my 500gb SSD (that i will refer to as QuickSpace from now on) used for storing games that need faster loadtimes (Warframe, marvel Rivals, helldivers, etc)

QuickSpace and FreeSpace are both exFAT since NTFS seems to be problematic for gaming on linux and no other file system is easily operational on both windows and linux. If you have other suggestions and know that they 100% work on both OSs im willing to change this.
________________________________________________________________________________________________

Steam is installed with "sudo pacman -S steam"

Multilib is enabled.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

This is the output of ls -l in the /mnt directory

drwxrwxrwx 4 mango mango 131072 Jun 2 00:28 FreeSpace
drwxrwxrwx 6 mango mango 131072 Jun 2 00:28 QuickSpace

and this is the out of ls -l in the / directory

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 May 3 23:26 bin -> usr/bin
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jan 1 1970 boot
drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4280 Jun 2 00:28 dev
drwxr-xr-x 81 root root 4096 Jun 2 00:28 etc
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jun 1 20:16 home
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 May 3 23:26 lib -> usr/lib
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 May 3 23:26 lib64 -> usr/lib
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Jun 1 20:01 lost+found
drwxrwxrwx 4 mango root 4096 Jun 1 22:26 mnt
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jun 1 21:32 opt
dr-xr-xr-x 399 root root 0 Jun 2 00:28 proc
drwx------ 5 root root 4096 Jun 1 21:24 root
drwxr-xr-x 26 root root 580 Jun 2 00:30 run
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 May 3 23:26 sbin -> usr/bin
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jun 1 20:14 srv
dr-xr-xr-x 13 root root 0 Jun 2 00:47 sys
drwxrwxrwt 22 root root 540 Jun 2 00:59 tmp
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 Jun 2 00:16 usr
drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4096 Jun 2 00:28 var
________________________________________________________________________________________________

these are the lines i have added to the fstab file to mount the drives on boot

UUID=EABC-D500 /mnt/FreeSpace exfat users,exec,rw,suid,dev,atime,diratime,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=000 0 0

UUID=B60C-9DBC /mnt/QuickSpace exfat users,exec,rw,suid,dev,atime,diratime,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=000 0 0

________________________________________________________________________________________________

I have no clue what else im supposed to do to fix this. I've reinstalled ArchLinux like 6 times now. The very first time I installed it steam worked completely fine, but since then i havent been able to replicate it.

I just want to play warframe on linux is that too much to ask for ;-;

jl2 · 2025-06-03 12:28:35

You need to use a filesystem that supports symlinks for steam games. exfat does not.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Steam# … ing_Proton says you can use exfat, but not how to fix that problem. Just use ntfs, tried and used by myself. Hope you have another drive as temporary storage to copy it over.

Did you disable fast boot and hibernate for windows (NOT a bios setting)? If not, mandatory if your sharing partitions/drives/whatever between windows and linux.

Last edited by jl2 (2025-06-03 13:06:08)

thatdeadmango · 2025-06-04 02:37:13

I dont wanna jinx it but as of writing this whatever i did works!

As per your suggestion i swapped back over to NTFS. I dug deeper into the wiki link you posted and found a info page i hadn't seen before

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton … nd-Windows

Following the instructions under "Preventing NTFS Read Errors" has seemingly fixed the issue!

Arch Linux

#1 2025-06-01 21:32:47

Steam "An error occurred while launching this game : Disk write error"

#2 2025-06-03 12:28:35

Re: Steam "An error occurred while launching this game : Disk write error"

#3 2025-06-04 02:37:13

Re: Steam "An error occurred while launching this game : Disk write error"

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