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I've just installed Steam on Ubuntu 20.04, dual booted with windows on a huawei matebook 14 laptop. I am trying to set a games library directory on my Data disk, which is a separate hard drive. On boot the drive is not mounted, and when I mount it I can not create files on it, until changing permissions by remounting with read/write. However after remounting with read/write I can create files in the file browser, but steam still says read-only. I have added a line to fstab to mound with auto,exec permissions on boot but this doesn't even change permissions in the file browser. I have also tried changing the owner of the filesystem with chown, this allowed me to alter permissions in the file browser, but steam still gave the same error.

I have attached the output of ls -la in the appropriate folder on the disk, after remounting as you can see.

peter@peter-Ubuntu:/media/peter/Data$ sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/nvme0n1p4
[sudo] password for peter: 
peter@peter-Ubuntu:/media/peter/Data$ ls -la
total 16
drwxrwxrwx  1 root root 4096 Jun 15 08:58  .
drwxr-x---+ 3 root root 4096 Jul  3 17:58  ..
drwxrwxrwx  1 root root    0 Jun  7 13:21 '$RECYCLE.BIN'
drwxrwxrwx  1 root root 4096 Apr 16 05:53 'System Volume Information'

I imagine that running steam as root might avoid this problem but I do not like processes running as root that don't need to be.

Thanks in advance for any assistance, and let me know if I can provide any more information!

skinnypete
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1 Answers1

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Since this partition/drive is shared with Windows, can I assume it is formatted in NTFS? If that is the case, you will not be able to modify permissions or ownership of files. Check that the NTFS driver your system has installed is ntfs-3g which will permit you to read/write to NTFS partitions.

Make sure your fstab entry includes the UID and GID for the partition. Here is a good explanation of this: How do I correctly mount a NTFS partition in /etc/fstab?

Additionally, if you have your Windows install set for 'fast-boot' the NTFS partition will not be properly unmounted by Windows on shutdown. This leaves the drive in a sort of limbo state, which means Linux can not properly mount it when booted. This is why you want to disable 'fast-boot' when dual-booting: Why disable Fast Boot on Windows 8 when having dual booting?

Drauku
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    Thank you very much, your assumption is correct it is NTFS, so I was missing the ntfs-3g tag in fstab, and also had fast boot enabled in Windows. You premptively solved my next problem. For clarity to anyone searching, the line I had to append to /etc/fstab was the following:

    UUID=<UUID of disk/partition to be mounted> /media/user/Data ntfs-3g auto auto,rw,exec 0 0

    Thanks again Chris, you have saved me a headache!

     – skinnypete Jul 03 '20 at 20:15