Steam won’t work

pcsteam

My computer was reformatted but the when I try to open Steam now it gives me this message

Steam failed to load StartSteamEngine(0x1bf598) failed with error 1. Unable to write to the current Steam application folder. Please move Steam to a folder where you have write priveleges"

I am anything but techy, so does anybody have an idiot's guide to what to do next? Any help is much appreciated

Best Answer

In recent versions of Windows, the 'Program Files' and 'Program Files (x86)' have restricted write access.

The most straightforward fix is to uninstall and reinstall Steam using the default installation settings.

This should write the Steam files in a "VirtualStore" folder than can be accessed as if it were actually in the 'Program Files' folder. It's probably more than you want to know, but you can see more details in the answers to this question on SuperUser.

Related Solutions

Steam – “Steam failed to load: *SteamStartEngine(0xbfffdf54) failed with error 1: A Steam Engine Instance already exists”

This is caused by a component of Steam not stopping correctly, and then when you try and reopen Steam it complains.

Open a terminal window and run the following command (type it in and press enter):

    ps -A | grep Steam

This will give you a list of running programs that have the word 'Steam' in them - usually 2 or 3. When I had your error and ran the above command this is what I saw:

    712 ??       700:23.42 /Applications/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/osx32/steam -psn_0_40970
    64849 ttys002    0:00.00 grep Steam

One of the items will be called 'grep Steam' - ignore that one. Each item in the list will have a number - this is the first piece of text on each line. The number we are interested in here is 712.

Run the following command to close the lingering Steam component:

    kill 712

Where you replace 712 with whatever number you found. If there was more than 1 number, run kill again with the other numbers too.

You should now be able to close the terminal, and run Steam just like normal. :-)

Steam – getting «delete of Steam.exe failed, Win32 Error 5 “Access is denied”»

I had this problem a lot as well. Remove steam, reinstall it, then run the setup as admin.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Steam – “Steam failed to load: *SteamStartEngine(0xbfffdf54) failed with error 1: A Steam Engine Instance already exists”

Steam – getting «delete of Steam.exe failed, Win32 Error 5 “Access is denied”»

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