Hello everyone, Long time watcher first time poster.
I’m preparing to switch to an Arch based distro running xfce. I like keeping my game installs on a separate disk for ease of use and clean system. I’ve learned that linux is capable of reading and writing to NTFS partitioned drives, even auto mounting through the FSTAB. So my question is: If I can mount my NTFS games drive in linux with read/write options… how would i pass it through to say Lutris or steam?
Welcome aboard!
In Steam you just need to add another library folder that links to the mount of the NTFS drive. Works the same with running your library over network, I have my Games on my NAS mounted with NFS via fstab. Really easy. You just have to make sure your user has execution rights on that mount as Steam is very fuzzy on this subject.
Steam → Settings → Downloads
Thank you for the Reply Exard!
Not using a Nas with NFS partions, but an actual windows NTFS partioned drive.
Lucky enough my distro of choice after first boot came pre-configured to read NTFS (windows) drives. Have steam running and tried to run Doom Eternal and Fallout 4. Files were Discovered but don’t launch. Using Force compatibility for Ge-Proton7-17. trying experimental now.
Check Proton DB whether the Games are working with Proton. But if no game even launches, my bet is that you need execution rights on the mount. I had this problem myself.
How do I set execution rights on the mount? as I though I had it… I could create and delete files no problem.
Post your fstab line with your NTFS drive. You may need to add masking options.
Still trying to get things Setup. reinstalled as dual boot till I’m more confident. Here is the contents of the fstab:
/etc/fstab: static file system information.
UUID=9499-7B9D /boot/efi vfat defaults,noatime 0 2
UUID=b68d0e7c-179e-4437-9dde-2ddb40815939 / ext4 defaults,noatime,discard 0 1
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
=========
Not sure how to read all of it.
Yeah, there is nothing there for your NTFS drive.
You would need to manually mount it to get things going.
Like it mentions, use blkid to find the UUID of your NTFS partition then add this
UUID=<NTFS_partition> /mnt/Steam ntfs defaults,noatime,nofail 0 0If it is an SSD then add the discard line to the options.
Then as root or use sudo mkdir -p /mnt/Steam && chown -R $USER /mnt/Steam
then again as root or sudo mount -av
You should see it pop up when doing df -h
If So, point your steam library to that location.
I’ll try this soon and get back to you. couple questions though, why /mnt/Steam? isn’t that just going to create a directory in the /mnt folder called steam? Does it matter if I call it steam or just any name? Say /mnt/WinGames as the drive does have more than just steam games on it.
what is df -h?
the chown -R $user /mnt/steam is just giving “me” or steam the proper privilege’s correct?
it is an ssd… well an m.2, but the fstab line should like this then: UUID=<NTFS_partition> /mnt/Steam ntfs defaults,noatime,nofail,*discard* 0 0 ?
Correct. You can call it what ever you like, you just need to create folder that you can mount the drive to.
This is a command called disk free. It shows you total space, used, and remaining space on each of the mounted drives.
The -h flag makes the space human readable.
This is just a quick.lazy way to see what is mounted, where and some drive attributes. There are other commands that can give similar information, this is just a unix staple.
Correct. Who ever is the user currently logged in doing the work would become the owner of the mount point. If you have a group that you would like to give permissions to the mount point then you can cheat with $USER:<group_name> and that will do it all in one go.
Example: $USER:steam_users
Correct. I assume the ** is for emphasis so just make sure to remove those.
You are Correct. Did remove it.
Out put from this was: chown: changing ownership of '/mnt/Games': Operation not permitted
Noticed the “permission” error, but went on with"
Its out put gave me:
/boot/efi : already mounted
/ : ignored
/tmp : already mounted
mount: (hint) your fstab has been modified, but systemd still uses
the old version; use 'systemctl daemon-reload' to reload.
/mnt/Games : successfully mounted
Finally df -h outputs:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
dev 16G 0 16G 0% /dev
run 16G 9.7M 16G 1% /run
/dev/nvme0n1p5 97G 14G 79G 15% /
tmpfs 16G 44M 16G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 16G 2.3M 16G 1% /etc/pacman.d/gnupg
tmpfs 16G 56M 16G 1% /tmp
/dev/nvme0n1p2 96M 26M 71M 27% /boot/efi
tmpfs 3.2G 92K 3.2G 1% /run/user/1000
/dev/sda 120M 52M 69M 43% /run/media/ichy/LINUX
/dev/nvme0n1p4 378G 58G 321G 16% /run/media/ichy/CA42A32A42A319E9
/dev/nvme1n1p1 954G 735G 220G 78% /mnt/Games
Don’t have time atm to try to run anything, have to get ready for work. I was expecting the “drive” to show up under the Devices list in “thunar”, like it was before the fstab edit.
Sorry, I don’t add sudo to the command so that people do not just copy and paste things without knowing what is going on and then blame me later for breaking there systems.
So the && allows you to do commands in sequence as long as the previous one finishes, but for every command, if it requires, sudo, then you will have to add it.
So it should have been sudo mkdir -p /mnt/Steam && sudo chown -R $USER /mnt/Steam
Or you can do them as separate commands.
You should be able to save it as a favorite, but no, if it is an auto mount, then no, most file managers will not show it because it is mounts as part of the regular filesystem (/mnt). You can play around with mount points to get different results. I think /media/* show up in the file explorer as a mounted item due to the nature of how /media was used for thumbdrives and optical drives before the move to systemd.
I figured this was the case since many programing languages use the similar opperands. I was under the idea that because of the “and” operator being used the CLI would “Interpret” for me that I wanted both commands to be sudo. Lesson Learned.
A side thought, do we HAVE to "re"mount the drive to have executable access to it? is there not a way to use chown/chmod on the drive? something like chmod u=rwx (directory)
Found something similar, all be it for ubuntu: can’t post links 
Yeah, from my development background I thought the same things but no, that is a bash ism and I guess it makes sense if you look at the order of operations on it. You would probably have to do something like sudo $(bash_command1 && basch_command2). Maybe, I don’t know.
Yeah, depending on your distro you could just chmod on the parent folder (/mnt/Games) . Just understand that NTFS and fat do not understand unix permissions and sometimes, once one of those filesystems are mounted, the parent folder cannot be modified until unloaded. You can also set up masking in you fstab to default to a set of ownership and file creation attributes and what not.