Arch Linux

thatdeadmango

Member

Registered: 2025-06-01

Posts: 2

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

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:
________________________________________________________________________________________________
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

Member

From: 47° 18' N 8° 34' E

Registered: 2022-06-01

Posts: 1,141

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

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)

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Why I run Arch? To "BTW I run Arch" the guy one grade younger.
And to let my siblings and cousins laugh at Arsch Linux...

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thatdeadmango

Member

Registered: 2025-06-01

Posts: 2

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

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!