Corrupt game updates on NTFS partitions

[kisak-valve]

This is a continuation of #4752, which the NTFS issue was accidentally combined with an ext4 issue.

Symptoms: Larger updates from games like Dota-2 and CS:GO fail to update when installed to an NTFS partition since the 2016-12-12 steam client update.

[dankatanka]

latest beta steam client and NTFS partition (FTL game as example on re-download broken cache)

[sethdusek]

Wouldn't just disabling the file-system "optimization" that you guys do on NTFS fix this until you guys find a better fix? Atleast then I won't have to boot windows just for dota

[TheGreatMcPain]

@sethdusek What file-system "optimization" are you referring to?

[dankatanka]

@sixsupersonic

Linux
Fixed issues when installing games onto filesystems, such as ZFS, that report abnormally large sector sizes.

[tonyscha]

I had this same issue on Ubuntu 16.04 on my NTFS partition, but not ext4. I found a work around posted on a previous issue #596 by updating fstab with the following information when mounting (defaults,exec,uid=1000,gid=1000).

Another note, is even smaller games that don't get the "corrupt update files" fail to validate after a successful install.

I'm getting the same symptoms with my SteamLibrary on a remote ZFS filesystem mounted via NFS4 under a local EXT4 partition.

Both machines are up-to-date 64-bit Arch Linux.
Remote ZFS is using default options, except "compression=on" and "atime=off", and was created with "ashift=12".
Local mount options are "noatime,exec,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576".

First game to show "CORRUPT UPDATE FILES" was TF2 (tooltip text says "..../downloading/440/bin/basehaptics.txt"). Tried verify, deleting local content, and manually deleting temp+download directories from filesystem. After researching issue, tried verifying a known-good game (UIplink) which failed. Download succeeds, but will fail a subsequent manual verification.

Also tried Steam beta and downloading from a different mirror without success.

[kisak-valve]

(From @lectrode at #4660 (comment))

Been having this issue for the past few months (same error messages and symptoms). I've tried everything from verifying files to fresh installing on a completely new computer and re-downloading all my games. The games experiencing the issue that I know of are CS:GO and Dota. Tested on both latest stable and latest beta versions of Steam for linux.

I'm using Btrfs for the main system partition. The games are stored on a larger hard drive formatted to NTFS. This setup was working fine until a few months ago (and still does for the rest of the games). Both hard drives are the standard mechanical ones, not SSD.

I did find something that seems fairly interesting: it fails when the NTFS hard drive is connected via SATA. If I connect the same hard drive via USB as an external device (through a SATA to USB adapter), it works without issue.

(There is nothing physically wrong with the SATA connections. As stated above I tried fresh installing everything on a new computer and had the same results)

(If you're wondering why I'm using NTFS instead of much better filesystems, its because this is usually part of a dual boot system and both the Windows games and Linux games are/will be stored on it)

Technical:
Kernel: 4.4.41-1-MANJARO
Steam: Built: Jan 19 2017 1:23:02; API: v017; package versions: 1484790260

[lectrode]

I can confirm the workaround in tonyscha's comment works. Glad I was directed to the current bug report. Looks like this also allows successfully verifying installed game files.

[sethdusek]

The workaround in @tonyscha's comment does indeed work

[AkAntA]

Confirming the workaround of @tonyscha as well.