Category:

Tutorial

Duration: 7:30

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From time to time there are reports from users wherein SteamOS won't load and stuck on a black screen / stuck on unable to update. Usually this is caused by insufficient disk space. Most of the suggestions are to reimage / reinstall SteamOS, or use a SteamOS recovery image to free up space. But that's not ideal and that's a long method. So I decided to show a quick and easy method by just plugging in a USB keyboard and using some basic Linux commands.


So for this video, I purposely filled up my disk and it has 0 bytes free space left! SteamOS won't load because of that, and using some basic Linux commands I am able to fix it in less than 10mins.


The idea is to boot SteamOS to single user mode so it drops to a bash root prompt. And then mount the home partition and from there perform the maintenance / delete files in the shader cache folder to free up space.


This are the commands I used in this video, and a brief description of what the command does -

mount -n -o rw,remount / - this command remounts the root (/) partition to read / write.

steamos-readonly disable - same as above but I prefer the first one as it is not specific to SteamOS. I am using MAIN SteamOS 3.5 and the mount command didnt work so I did this command too.

mkdir -p /tmp/home - creates a directory called home in the /tmp directory.

mount /dev/nvme0n1p8 /tmp/home - mounts partition 8 of the first nvme drive to /tmp/home.

df -h | grep home - shows free disk space in human readable format and filter for the string home.

cd - change directory.

cd .. - go one level higher in the directory tree.

ls - list files and directories.

rm - remove files.

rm -rf - remove files including directories recursively and forcefully (use this with caution!).

du -sh * - show disk usage in the current directory in human readable format.

reboot -f - reboot the system.

Does it work!? Of course it does! Enjoy the video and happy gaming!