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I recently reinstalled steam and rather then wait hours and hours for the thing to download all of the content again I decided that I would simply copy all of the cache files and other content from a copy of my steam directory that I had laying around.

This worked fine for portal and I was up and playing without issue within minutes. I then tried the same process to get half-life and counter strike working and needless to say this did not go quite as well.

Everytime I would attempt to launch a game of either I would simply be presented with a validating 100% issue upon which the game would never actually launch. I decided the best course of action rather then screw around all night trying to figure out what was going on would be to google the issue and see if others had encountered a similar issue. It was during this search that I came across the following blog and another guy having the same issue as me:

http://cathodetan.blogspot.com/2008/01/steam-validating-and-validating-and.html

While the issue does not appear to of been caused by the same thing the end result is the same. I can gather from his blog that he tried a few different things including contacting valve customer support but to no avail. His path led to a few other things that you can read on his blog such as the following:

http://cathodetan.blogspot.com/2008/02/valve-says-no-refund-to-broken-software.html

Anyhow his issues are not my point just figured that I would point it out. At any rate I appear to of discovered a really simply fix for this issue which I have been able to use on multiple games to resolve this issue. At first it was so simple I could hardly believe that was all I had to the entire time.

Enough blabbering, the fix is as such:

• Right click on the game which is displaying the issue
• Click on the “Local Files” tab
• Click on “verify integrity of game cache”

It will go through an identical process as the initial “Validating files” process however this time it will take a little longer and what it is done it will actually work. I tried this process on each of the three games and each time it worked so while I cant promise that it will work for everyone it is at least worth a try as not a whole lot else that was recommended seemed and that includes the following:

• Deleting all files from the steam directory except for the steamapps file and the steam executable
• Reboot of both steam and Windows

If anyone tries this and it works let me know in the comments.