Disclaimer: I am very new to Linux (1 week).

I have installed the Valve version of Steam on LMDE6. I have used Disks to automatically mount the NTFS drive I used with Windows (doesn’t hold bootloader, it is just for Steam library storage) at boot ( /media/[username]/Gaming ) and I made it the default library folder in Steam.

Running games works perfectly (actually, performance is surprisingly good), but I cannot install them due to a “disk write error”.

I looked for solutions and found this page, from which I understand that I need to change permissions to the mounting point, but when I do, using chown -R, I get a “Read-only filesystem” error for all files and folders.

I can see no options to fix this in Disks and I tried to edit fstab once, but it messed things up so badly I had to use the USB drive with the portable installer to fix things.

  • stuner@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    3 months ago

    Like many others here, I think the most likely explanation here is that you did not fully shut down Windows and it still holds a lock on this partition. You can force an actual shutdown in Windows by shift-clicking on the start button -> shutdown.

    However, I would also recommend against sharing your Steam library between Linux and Windows. I also tried this with NTFS a few years ago and it caused me a lot of headaches. I had a lot of weird issues under Linux that went away after I finally switched to ext4.

  • daggermoon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    3 months ago

    Is this a dual-boot setup? NTFS on Linux is kind of ass. I’d recommend getting another drive and formatting it as btrfs or ext4. I would not use the same drive for Windows and Linux.

    • biofaust@lemmy.world
      OPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Yes, it is a transitional dual boot setup. Will be trying to pass to exFAT as suggested elsewhere for working on both. Then when I will figure out what hardware would be most compatible, I will eventually remove the dual boot and fix things accordingly.

  • cm0002@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    3 months ago

    NTFS support on Linux has never been good, iirc it still mounts NTFS as read-only by default. You can remount it as R/W, but it isn’t exactly recommended

    If you absolutely want to share the steam library between windows and Linux, id recommend either a second disk formatted as exFAT or a new storage partition on the same disk formatted as exFAT

    The key here is exFAT, one of the best options for cross-OS compatibility

    Edit: @biofaust@lemmy.world I just saw your reply to someone else in the thread that your steam library is on a separate drive already

    So that’s perfect! Just move everything off it temporarily and format it with exFAT filesystem and you should be fine

    • biofaust@lemmy.world
      OPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Thanks, I’ll try the formatting thing asap.

      Does it save me from the risk of filenames including colons etc that others were talking about?

      • cm0002@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        Yea the filename issue should be fine, there’s a risk of corruption with exFAT though as @tal@lemmy.today mentioned, but if you’re just storing steam games or other easily replaceable data, I wouldn’t worry about it to much IMO