Fixed! Steam Deck Stopped Launching Games and Phantom Storage

i love the steam net guys it is easily my favorite console to have come out ever and it honestly is amazing that i can just take a pc game with me wherever i go not only that i can mod the games like i could on the pc and the experience is just great so far aside from usual linux trickery that needs to happen the steam deck has been very solid problem is while it has been solid there is a lingering issue that currently makes the lowest model very difficult to use and it even affects the next tier up and that is an issue where the steam deck just refuses to launch any game whatsoever and there's also an additional issue that seems to happen around the same time where the internal storage gets full even if there's nothing on it this is a particularly weird issue for me because i actually store all of my games on microsd cards this is a microsd card holder this one has a terabyte microsd card in it then i can just slot in like a cartridge onto the steam deck and it works that way but unfortunately my internal storage is full of something and the truth is i think that these two are correlated and i'll explain why so let's get right into it [Music] hello and welcome my name is wolfie and you are watching greater than pie let's start with the diagnosis so what is happening consistently every time the steam that gets into the mode where it won't launch a single game well fortunately we know that we're having issues with storage because the storage error message actually pops up every single time saying that our storage is lower what i'm assuming is happening on a software level is that the micro sd card is transferring some of its data to internal storage to allow the game to load more efficiently the truth is the micro sd cards inside the steam deck are still standard speed micro sd cards but they load like they are on the internal storage itself this is actually a technology that amd has already and is not something that is unheard of in the pc space using a sort of ssd cache if you will intel optane was another version of that so my leading hypothesis is that what is happening here is the steam deck is trying to move data from the micro sd card to its internal storage and the internal storage is unfortunately unable to receive it because it is full but the question is what is taking up all that space and to that we're gonna have to do some digging all right so here's a pretty good representation of this problem you see there are exactly three things installed on the steamback right now there is proton which is taking up a gig and point zero four and then about less than a gigabyte remaining for steam uh runtime soldier and steamworks common distributables so something is obviously wrong here because how are we using up the entirety of 39.97 gigabytes that that is the question and so with only 4.22 gigabytes remaining we need to fix whatever issue this is in order to allow us to actually continue to use the steam deck because i unfortunately if this bar fills up the steam deck will enter a lockdown mode that is best described as refusing to launch anything and not telling you anything so i think the best course of action is going to be for us to hop into the desktop mode and see if we can find out what is taking up the space because it's not reporting to steam what it is let's open up our file manager and let's take a look at our main drive properties what's in here so about 1.3 gigabytes so that's not our problem uh-huh in here though there we go 38 gigabytes so what is in here all right we got desktop all right makes sense templates videos hello i think we found it okay so it's gonna be in this folder oh huh watch one this one what is in here you know what let me check here steam sounds the most realistic culprit and it is we're just tracking these files down trying to figure out where they are there we go okay so it's on steam apps all right is it compact data just like with skyrim no that is down just five gigs shader cache aha so we found the file it is the shader cache file now this is a bit odd because well the shader caches are actually game specific they're not something that really should be stored on the main storage unless they need to be accessed immediately so there is a way that i think we can fix this by using a little bit of linux trickery we can probably move this to the sd card and still have the steam deck work the way it's supposed to we're going to actually have to make a link archived file now this is something you can do in windows 2. uh it's just a shortcut file but fortunately because i've been messing around with linux i have experienced this a little bit so what we're going to do is we're going to need to figure out what these ids correlate to which game unfortunately you can't really dig around the file to find out but i do know that skyrim is this number right here because of my modding video that i actually did before this one so we can take that move it to our skyrim sd card and then create a link archive between the two of them this means whenever this data is called upon which will only be when the sd card is installed with skyrim it will access that folder and immediately go to the sd card instead of staying on the main memory hypothetically this should have absolutely no repercussions delete that all right all right all right and then we're going to create a new we're going to name it the same thing before eight nine eight three zero and we're gonna paste it to this location okay hey i think that worked all right well really the only way to find out so test it let's see if skyrim just launches oh but it's going to try to play my old version of this yeah well if it launches and it doesn't do anything like update the directories then we're all good and then we can just do that for every game brilliant upload a new character just because that will be easier than trying to configure the mods which i'm going to have to do anyway later because i was actually already getting my files ready to transfer back over to here to get a new version of it running but no we're alive and shaders look pretty good looks like it's supposed to oh it's supposed to with mods i should say yeah no that is good that is good that is good that is good so it seems like it worked and it doesn't seem like the storage changed very much which is very unusual so let me see if i can figure out what's going on here and we'll determine it further let's actually use my main sd card and actually put the rest of the files on there and maybe see if maybe skyrim just didn't need that much data okay we're back from doing that and that took a little bit longer than expected because um there were a lot of files and linking them all individually is a bit tricky but now that the two sd cards that had games on them have the correct shaders attached to it i can now sort of take the guesswork out of doing this again i did figure out why the storage wasn't changing i didn't empty the trash bin apparently the steam deck moves everything to trash and doesn't auto delete anything uh it was a bit tricky to get around some of these files so empty out the trash bin and if you look at it now you can see that we have 32.19 gigabytes free meaning most of our internal storage is now completely free and i did go ahead and test it it works on every single game not just skyrim i can load up cyberpunk i can load up anything that was actually already on that sd card so this works and it worked well it worked easily and my games are launching again so so it seems that we have fixed it we've actually killed two birds with one stone the storage filling up with phantom data and more importantly the steam deck not launching games that's where we're gonna end it today thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed watching this video consider giving it a like commenting subscribing i hoped that this helped you guys this is something that was plugging my steam deck from the beginning and fortunately now it's no longer a problem and i will continue to use this until valve offers a patch that works in its favor if not uh well valve this is free information for you guys this is the problem with your steam deck go ahead and just implement this like this is not too bad it works just fine so yeah just if you do that i don't know leave a comment or something that'd be awesome but that's where we're gonna end thank you guys so much and i'll see you in the next video wolfy out [Music] you

Channel: GreaterThanPie

Views: 18,192

Keywords: how to fix steam games not launching, GTP, GreaterThanPie, Gaming, Wolfy, wolfy546, greaterthanpie, GamerGuts, Lecroton, PieEatingWolfBunnies, PEWB, Console, Greater Than pie, steam deck, steam os, valve steam deck, steam games not launching, steam games not working, steam fix, steam games wont launch, steam games not launching fix tutorial, steam games not starting, phantom data, internal storeage, Internal storage full problem, fixed

Id: JDNro6MKA9Y

Length: 11min 14sec (674 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 25 2022