How can I install and run Steam games on external drive? Because I tried to format the drive in ExFAT, NTFS and btrfs (the same of my machine) but with a filesystem I can install the game but it doesn’t start at all, and with another I can’t add the drive as other location on steam
It works great and means I can take my Steam library anywhere. I just have to make sure I click “Mount volume” on the disk’s desktop icon before starting Steam, Lutris or Heroic.
If your steam install is done using Flatpak that can result in the steam program being sandboxed and limited in what it can access. I have no experience with how this limits things, the flatseal tool may be needed to manage the flatpak steam program. You can setup the specific flatpak to have access to other filesystems and mountpoints outside of your home. the command flatpak list
should show if you have steam installed via flatpak or not.
Flatpak notes at the end…
I have NO idea how the steam SNAP version differs in how it can access other locations either.
Continueing with the normal guide now…
Steam Game Directory on NTFS (fat32/exfat/vfat)
don’t use the file manager to mount the filesystem setup a /etc/fstab line to mount it at boot time you do NOT (typically) use chown or chmod on a mounted NTFS. (you do use those commands with ext4) example fstab entry.
On Ubuntu you can use ‘ntfs’ instead of ntfs-3g for the filesystem in the fstab options if you have ntfs-3g installed , it auto changes NTFS to be ntfs-3g. Other distribution may differ. When ntfs3 gets more commonplace, and stable likely people will switch to using ntfs3, and drop ntfs-3g
Newer Distribution and kernels may use the ntfs3 driver, I have not tested that driver. Try it out and see if it works.
The various issues and problems with ntfs getting mounted Read Only still apply. (hit up the numerous NTFS under Linux guides for more information) These issues also apply to exfat,vfat, fat32, and I imagine using ntfs3. Disable windows hibernate/suspend and fast boot if sharing a filesystem between linux and windows.
And …
it’s best to not use ntfs for your game storage drive , it can be slower and more of a CPU load. It does Work for me, but it is slower in my experience.
also… there are a lot of bad/wrong/old posts/blogs/guides on this topic. so watch out for those. (some of the info here may be wrong, so dont trust this guide 100%)
This guide may be outdated or wrong when we start using ntfs3.
Also be sure to check out this guide, and the part about the compatdata directory
use steam and tell it to put a steam library on /home/bob/games install games as normal.
ntfs3 notes
from user mandiblesarecute who gives an example with ntfs3
PARTLABEL=Win10 /media/win10 ntfs3 noacsrules,noatime,nofail,prealloc,sparse 0 0 noacsrules makes everything effectively 777 for when you don’t need or care about fine grained access control.
This 777 mode can be annoying and a security issue in some use cases which is why it’s not the default.
I had issues using Ntfs3, so for now I still use Ntfs-3g , i will test out ntfs3 again in the future as it matures.
Steam flatpak notes from another user. TimRambo1
For flatpaks you want to use the flatseal tool to allow access to the filesystem mountpoint of your steam games filesystem.
example: add mount point /home/(username)/games/
under filesystem under the steam settings in flatseal.
The filesystem still has to be properly mounted (as shown above)
Make sure the file system is ext4 and make sure the drive is mounted when you go to add the library on the external drive. A lot of games won’t launch on Linux if the file system isn’t ext4
I highly recommend ext4 for the game partition. Steam can be picky and it used to not allow anything other than ext4. Also, how is your external drive connected (ie… USB2, USB3)? Is it an SSD?
I’m not in reach of a pc to test, but I think the problem is that the partition is mounted temporary. Try making a new mountpoint and adding it to fstab (with noauto iirc, so that your system does not hang when you start with the drive unplugged).
mkdir (If it is in a dir where you have no write access, you need to sudo or doas)
Unmount the automounted /dev/sda1
umount /dev/sda1
Then mount sda1 to the newly created dir
mount /dev/sda1
Then you can use genfstab to create a fstab entry. (You maybe need to sudo pacman -S arch-install-scripts)
genfstab /
This will write a fstab file to stdout (the terminal). Look for the line with , copy it and sudo open the /etc/fstab file with your prefered editor. Add the line at tge bottom and add the flags rw,user,noauto to the entry.
This way you have to manually mount sda1 every time you boot with mount /dev/sda1
You can add that to your .bashrc or equivalent. (If you don’t plan to remove the disk, you can skip the noauto and the drive will be loaded automatically, but if it is unplugged your system won’t boot normally). Maybe there is a better way, but this way works for me good enough.
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