All downloads stuck Initializing - found a solution

Hello,

I found this problem and solution when all my games were unable to either install or update. The games were all on the same drive.

Whenever I delete the app cache (ProgramData) and try to reinstall the game it says “Whoops something went wrong.” Whenever the game tries to update it was permanently stuck “initializing”. Reboots didn’t resolve the issue nor did changing DNS. I noticed the problem when I was unable to create a test folder on this data drive. CMD said “the disk is read only” and the option was not available in Explorer. SFC /scannow found no problems and afforded no resolutions.

The issue was that the drive was marked as “read only”.

After clearing the flag in DISKPART (there’s plenty of guides for this) I was able to update games again with no problems on this data disk. Obviously this will only apply to those who have a secondary drive for game data (as I highly doubt a C: drive could mark itself read only). In my case, the storage drive was a Storage Spaces parity array in Windows 10.

This issue is very rare and I’ve only seen disks flag themselves as read only without cause <5 times in a 7 year IT career.