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Steam want to validate the cache of Team fortress 2, everytime I launch it, pretty darn irritating.

Frag at 0%, Running it in Win 8(VHD)

Any way to skip it?

P.S:-It is nowhere related to HDD failing in my case, though it might indicate data corruption in your's, see SMART data.

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  • How many times has it happened? Because I sometimes had to manually "validate game cache" multiple times before the game finally stabilized on non-corrupted data.
    – Oak
    Apr 28, 2012 at 15:46
  • @Oak 3 days now :'(, around 5 times, I have no corrupted data chkdsk'ed
    – HackToHell
    Apr 28, 2012 at 15:48
  • I hate this bug. Sometimes to fix it, I have to resort to uninstalling the game and reinstalling it.
    – Martin Tuskevicius
    Apr 28, 2012 at 15:48
  • 2
    Well Steam does not know the underlying Filesystem yet, so this problem can't be really solved I think. Win8 is not yet officially supported.
    – user12190
    Apr 28, 2012 at 15:58
  • @scorcher24 The game is installed in Win7, but since I am having a problem with 7, I can't log in, so I am running steam from 8.
    – HackToHell
    Apr 29, 2012 at 4:00

5 Answers 5

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No. There is no way to skip file validation in Steam.

I can't support an issue specifically with regard to Windows 8 so if that's the issue, the only solution that I can propose is to wait until this software is officially supported on Windows 8.

There are alternative possible explanations. The following is based on my own experience with Steam doing this to me for TF2 and a similar case can be found here

When I first installed TF2 some time ago on a Windows Vista install, it exhibited this behaviour for me. The problem as it turns out was with my hard disk. By defragmenting my disk and my game, I managed to resolved the issue. You can try defragmenting the game files in Steam through the Local Files tab of Team Fortress 2's Properties page in the Steam Library, but I found using the OS's defragmentation tool was necessary if I recall. I'd recommend doing both just to be safe. You may need to validate files manually after this, but it should hopefully be the last time. At the time, there were no bad sectors reported and the hard drive was less than a year old, but fast-forward a year or two and that hard disk died on me so this may be an early indication of a problem with the hard disk that you may want to look into.

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  • My HDD is 7 months old.
    – HackToHell
    Apr 29, 2012 at 12:21
  • 3
    There are two kinds of fragmentation at play: GCF fragmentation and actual HDD fragmentation. GCF is a file format used by various Source games which essentially acts as a virtual hard disk for content; this file can suffer from internal fragmentation as files get changed and deleted, and this is the only kind of fragmentation Steam concerns itself with. The OS only deals with actual HDD fragmentation, which Steam has no knowledge about - for that to play a role, Steam would have to test file access times, which seems highly unlikely.
    – Michael Madsen
    Apr 29, 2012 at 12:30
  • @MichaelMadsen Just because Steam has no knowledge of a problem does not mean the problem doesn't affect Steam and its decision to validate files. Your statement is very informative, but doesn't necessarily mean that this is not the solution. As stated, that was my experience and that's what happened. Do what you will with that.
    – skovacs1
    Apr 29, 2012 at 12:43
  • @HackToHell Unfortunately, age does not negate the failure of hardware]. This isn't fully inclusive, but doesn't say anything about it being impossible for a 7 month old hard disk to fail.
    – skovacs1
    Apr 29, 2012 at 12:49
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    @HackToHell I didn't say it is and I'm glad to hear your HDD is running well. As I said, the HDD of mine that this happened on failed within 2 years and so this problem may be an indicator of a larger problem. My HDD could have failed for any number of possible reasons, but I have no way to know. The word "may" expresses a possibility and does not define a certainty. I was simply recounting an anecdote of my personal experience, trying to help solve a problem and noting an observation of a possibility that could potentially help prevent a problem.
    – skovacs1
    Jul 23, 2012 at 18:58
3

You might try this:

1) In your Steam library, go to Team Fortress 2, Right Click->Properties
2) Go to the Local Files tab, and try these options

  • Verify integrity of game cache
  • De-fragment Game Files

The final option, if the above didn't work is to

  • Delete local game content. and reinstall.

Obviously only do this as a last resort.

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0

I believe this is a filesystem issue. I get the some problem when I try to run games that I store on my ext3 drive (accessed via 3rd party driver), indicating that Steam seems to make quite low level system calls to check files.

You will just have to deal with it till Steam updates to deal with the new FS specs.

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0

I have this behavior on my Dad's old corrupt Windows XP computer (programs close without warning etc).

This does NOT happen on my Windows 8 laptop. I don't think it is caused by steam. My suggestilon would be to try deleting the TF2 game cache and start again.

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-3

Theres is no solution but you can got to updates,and select do not keep my game updated. should be faster

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  • 4
    Considering how often TF2 is updated, this will likely lead to errors pretty quickly.
    – kotekzot
    Apr 26, 2013 at 11:52

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