Assistance Needed Please - Steam Drive Hot Swapping Broken

[LightyKD]

Any chance I can get a few people to help me out with something? I'm trying to prove to Valve that their drive hot swapping feature is broken. Basically the way it works is (BTW Ill be using a bit of Windows terminology)...

1) setup a new drive and Steam folder. For this example, imagine you already have a games drive (G: ) but you're running out of space so you grab a USB stick (E: ) to install a game you want to play real quick.

2) after setting up your new drive /steam folder (which can only be done in desktop mode for some damn reason ). Select a game you want to install to the USB stick (E: in this example). Make sure its a game that is not already installed elsewhere on your machine.

3) note that on the Steam Store page for the game, you should have a blue "Install" button. Install the game to your USB stick (E: ) and the blue button changes from "Install" to a green "Play" button

4) Here is the important part and what I need to see if others are having trouble with. If you unplug the USB stick the "Play" button should revert back to "Install". When you plug the stick back in, "Install" should change back to "Play". Please tell me if this is the case for you.

I have 4 Windows machines (2 being Steam Decks) used for gaming and Steam is not registering when a drive has been removed and adjusting game status appropriately. Is anyone else seeing this? I tried to alert Valve support to the fact that hot swapping has been broken since October of 2024 but they wont listen simply because my main gaming rig is my Windows 10 Steam Deck.

Any help would be appreciated and thank you to anyone that tries this.

 

[Latiodile]

there's been a lot of broken features in steam for years, like the media player and installing from physical media
i had no idea steam even supported hotplugging library drives

 

[LightyKD]

there's been a lot of broken features in steam for years, like the media player and installing from physical media
i had no idea steam even supported hotplugging library drives

Yeah they talked about it for roughly 2-3 years and it was a lovely feature! My "physical" Steam games installed to SD cards were a lot easier to use for a while. Now I have to use a bat file to restart Steam every time I'm ready to swap a game card. I even recommended to Valve that if they don't have the time to fix hot swapping, at least add a "restart Steam" option in Big Picture Mode. Of course they did nothing.

 

[FluffyLunamoth]

It works completely fine for me. Maybe it's just your system. I do it all the time on both Windows and Steamdeck.

 

[LightyKD]

It works completely fine for me. Maybe it's just your system. I do it all the time on both Windows and Steamdeck.

Odd. I did a complete removal and new install of Windows back in December and it was still an issue. *sigh* I guess its time for more digging. Thanks for the info.