Permanently mount drive containing Steam games installed in Windows
I have Windows installed on a separate drive from bazzite containing all my Steam games and I’m able to access those games in bazzite by mounting the drive no problem. The issue is every time I reboot, I have to repeat the process of switching over to desktop mode, opening up Steam settings>Storage, mounting the drive which requires me to enter in my password and then switching back to game mode. Is there a way to permanently mount the drive and set it as the default storage location in Steam and also remove the need to constantly enter my password to access the drive?
37 Replies
Use GNOME Disks/KDE Parition Manager to set up the mount options, which just edits
/etc/fstab to include mount instructions for the driveawesome thanks, how do you install GNOME Disks? I could not figure it out lol
Whichever DE you use, the corresponding partition manager is installed
Already
if you prefer gnome disks over kde partition manager then enter in a host terminal:
our docs have an automount secondary drives guide
Universal Blue
Bazzite Documentation
[Bazzite_Documentation] General FAQ Installation Guide Gaming Guide Contributing to Bazzite Software Installing and Managing Applications Waydroid Guide Updates, Rollbacks, & Rebasing Tips and Tricks Image Specific Steam Deck, Handheld, & HTPC Images (Gaming Mode Variant) Change physical keyboard layout for Gaming Mode Managing Extensions ...
thanks!
you have to reboot after it installs btw
I’m stuck on this part of the auto mount guide
I've been using Linux for the better part of 2 decades... I still can't tell you what mount options to use
find the options from an existing mount and see if they work for you
yeah my bad like term said
this is the hardest part of linux
managing disks 😭
is the drive btrfs
The drive is ntfs (it’s my Windows installation drive)
then copy the btrfs section that doesnt have a label
oh....
that shouldnt be a game drive tbh
but copy the ntfs stuff into the no label section
yeah this doc is new and i guess i have to fix it. i had help with this and honestly i think both of us realized that trying to make a universal guide for this is difficult
It works when I manually mount it in Steam. I just don’t want to have to reinstall all the games I had already installed through windows
yeah but proton hates NTFS drives
So what would you recommend I do to have a shared partition between a dual booted device with Windows and bazzite?
oh heh
well there's an unofficial btrfs driver for windows
but it's experimental
not exactly sure how stable that is
windows filesystem and linux filesystem is very different stuff
maybe ask in #🎮bazzite
Oh lol, I guess I’ll try this auto mount method to see if it works then. I just hope my Windows drive doesn’t get wiped or corrupted from auto mounting
im starting to see a lot of new users are using handhelds
could try that too
⚠️ do this carefully
read and understand why you do not want to store game prefixes on NTFS
I would also install Proton to your internal Linux drive as well
I think I’ll try all this when I get my Win Mini lol. Don’t want to risk losing data on my Windows drive. I’m mainly testing out bazzite on my Win Max 2 just to get familiar with it before I get my mini. Anyway, thanks for your guys help. I’ll def refer back to this thread once I get it
not sure when you're getting this, but most likely in a couple of weeks or so we will be getting a major update (based on fedora 40 builds) so maybe things will improve by then for handhelds lol
Nice! Yea, I should be getting it in about two weeks so I can wait.
For what it’s worth, when I used to have a dual boot machine with an NTFS drive, I would just make a link in place of the compatdata folder in the Steam library of the NTFS drive and have that point onto a Linux drive and I was fine. Since it does Wine things there, having it on an NTFS drive is a no-no. But Windows doesn’t really care about the broken link in Windows as far as I can tell. It just doesn’t work, and because you are running steam on windows there, it doesn’t have to care about that folder anyway.
I think a windows chkdsk might get rid of that link though, but if you don’t do anything to make windows upset it should be fine
I remember doing something similar with my dualbooted Steam Deck
symlinks were extremely useful to use
symlinks is a workaround, not something we would recommend though because as noted chkdsk can in some cases remove it.
Im also waiting on a '24 mini. Set up dual boot with windows/bazzite on a shared NTFS drive on a old X1 Carbon to make sure what in was trying to do made sense. I used the linked Valve guide from GitHub and it works fine. Only thing I'm going to do different for the mini is set up a separate NTFS partition for the steam library so it'll be something like 100 GB Windows, 75 GB Bazzite and 1.xx tb shared NTFS drive.
Mind sharing a link to that guide? Hmm…I thought the shared partition had to be a specific format, btrfs I think? I’m not sure
Yea, it is btrfs lol. Someone responded to my other thread.
https://discord.com/channels/1072614816579063828/1226006137430741012/1226120500279902218
this works great. In addition to doing this, I created a symlink to my steamapps directory created by Windows replacing the one created by Steam in bazzite located in the root of the mounted ntfs drive.
Everything seems to be working great. The Windows ntfs drive is auto-mounted on boot without password requirements, I'm able to set that drive as the default storage in Steam so all my games load from the symlink'd directory. I also booted into Windows, installed a couple of games and booted back into bazzite and the games load fine. The only thing I haven't tested is installing Steam games in bazzite and then checking to see if they work on Windows fearing that this might break something.
Ensure that compatdata does not exist on the NTFS drive
Did a search and nothing came up so I should be good. Where would it typically be created/located just in case?
steamapps/compatdata/
Symlinking the entire steamapps folder is incorrect
It goes directly against Valve’s NTFS instructions
And will likely lead to drive corruptionDo you have a link to this guide?
Already provided
specifically this part
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows#preventing-ntfs-read-errors
GitHub
Using a NTFS disk with Linux and Windows
Compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine and additional components - ValveSoftware/Proton
thank you! I think I have everything setup correctly now