Optimisation update crashes hard drive

[bilgehan1122]

For the past few months I have been having trouble with warframe, where it would ask me to "optimise my install," promising to "speed up mission loading and trim wasted hard drive space."

The first time I got this message, tried to apply the optimisation, and crashed the hard drive the game is on, I did not think it was related to warframe but just a coincidence (thankfully it is not on C, scared to try it on the C drive). I tried a bunch of ways to bring back the hard drive (none of the normal ways working), and eventually succeeded by restarting my pc. I ran diagnostics to see if it was on poor health and the diagnostics came back fine.

A day later, I tried launching warframe again. I got the "optimisation" message again and tried to install it again. The drive the game is on crashed again. I tried to launch the game without optimisations, and the game ran fine.

It has been more than a month since this happened. I wanted to wait and see if any crash event would occur when I did not try to optimise warframe. Unsurprisingly, there have not been any drive crashes during this time interval. Today, I have tried to optimise warframe again. I was hoping that it would not crash and that whatever caused it to crash the last two times was fixed at this point.
Warframe crashed my hard drive again.

I have no idea what is causing it as I am not getting error messages from warframe itself. Please fix whatever is broken as this is a ridiculously funny bug. Reminds me of the minecraft launcher deleting system32 bug.

My pc is Dell precision M4800. It runs on windows 10. I have more than adequate space left over for warframe to download its files on my hard drive (more than 100GB free space).

[bilgehan1122]

Update: I have decided to risk it again and try the optimisation process once more, after the game update (current size: 873mb). Started off well enough, got to 21% at a decent pace and then just jumped to 32%. It's been stuck at 32% for 10 minutes now, I will leave it like this for now and do a followup to this later.

At least it hasn't crashed my hard drive yet so that's nice.

It hasn't been even a minute but time for an update: the warframe launcher suddenly disappeared. Can't see it on taskbar but steam shows me as playing warframe right now. Task manager shows warframe on as well, and my "memory" bar is at 98%. Yaaaay... It's taking up 9000MB of memory. I will do a followup later on.

Update: I'M shutting it down, it continued like that for around half an hour and then I noticed that my OS hard drive was running extremely low on free space. Tried to find out what the game was writing so much data onto but could not find it. Don't want to wait and see what happens when I run out of space. After I closed the game, the drive returned to its original size.

This is such horse dung

Oh damn the game won't launch now! "An error occurred while updating Warframe (invalid platform)." Yes because it being on a pc is not enough, you need a super pc.

[bilgehan1122]

Oh my god, it crashed the steamapps folder so it was probably trying to install the game to the C drive. I can't play any of my games right now. This is hilarious!

Seriously, fix this please, it keeps crashing something every time it tries to optimise itself

[MillbrookWest]

4 hours ago, bilgehan1122 said:

Oh my god, it crashed the steamapps folder so it was probably trying to install the game to the C drive. I can't play any of my games right now. This is hilarious!

Seriously, fix this please, it keeps crashing something every time it tries to optimise itself

The game files are in compressed archives. To make a change to the archive, a given file needs to be decompressed, and then the change made. This takes up additional HDD space as the decompressed files need to sit somewhere temporarily. The files are also then "defragged" so the data is contiguous. This results in the disc thrashing i assume you are observing as the drive "crashing".

Not too sure if the launcher states as much, but the process can take some time depending on the hardware configuration - Quick google on the Dell shows its a mobile workstation, with a range of disk options so no idea which applies here. But needless to say, the older the drive, the less it will like being thrashed; Disk drives in general (quite literally) don't respond well to being thrashed. The process can take upwards of 30 mins, depending on what needs to be changed.

I'd suggest leaving it over night while you sleep. If it's not done in the morning you can probably open a support ticket and try to get help there.

Otherwise, you can just ignore it. If you have the space, and don't mind slightly longer load times, there's no immediate need to run it (tho i think DE will force one eventually when the update necessitates it, so you might want to get is sorted before then).

As an aside; You probably shouldn't use 'C' drive as the default location for game files for this reason - and if you can, you should probably try to keep all programs off 'C' save for the OS. If a program consumes the IO for the drive (quite easy with a hdd) it starves access for the OS as well.

[bilgehan1122]

5 hours ago, MillbrookWest said:

The game files are in compressed archives. To make a change to the archive, a given file needs to be decompressed, and then the change made. This takes up additional HDD space as the decompressed files need to sit somewhere temporarily. The files are also then "defragged" so the data is contiguous. This results in the disc thrashing i assume you are observing as the drive "crashing".

Oh, interesting. Had no idea, thank you!

I know overloading the C drive can have bad consequences in the future, that is why I have D as my default. What I meant was that after I tried to optimise the game, the steamapps folder became inaccessible, by me or by any other program. It was after this that warframe took up 9GB of memory for half an hour and started filling up C. I just assumed that it was installing another copy of the game on C.

Thank you very much for the reply, but it seems like I fixed it by reinstalling the game. What's curious is that this pc could handle the other optimisation updates, so what was so different this time? Nonetheless, I'll look into that thrashing process. Again, thanks for the info.