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So I recently reinstalled steam because it was acting a little funky and now the program behaves in a much more stable manner. the only problem is steams problem with using secondary HDD since the program only installs on the main drive and you can't change it. now I have over 20 games I'll have to reinstall if I can't figure out this problem.

I've already tried sudo chown and the error I get is what happens when I try and add the library folder on my second drive. this happened before and after sudo chown. now all of my folders are locked on my main drive for some reason even though there are only 2 users on my system, myself and I assume admin.

syi
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  • I just tried 'sudo chmod a+rwx' and that didn't work, steam still says no games for me – syi Nov 28 '14 at 01:32

1 Answers1

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I was recently having an issue with Steam not having execute permissions on a mounted filesystem, I found what the actual problem was due to how the folders are named.

In your home directory you have two folder locations for Steam;

.steam/steam/SteamApps

and

.local/share/Steam/SteamApps

by default games will install under .local/share/Steam/SteamApps unless you have chosen another directory from within Steam client. The problem is Steam client is trying to look for games and software under SteamApps directory, but this directory name is Upper and Lower Case name, it needs to be Lower Case name so all you just need to really do is make a symbolic link to that folder like so;

ln -s SteamApps steamapps

this should hopefully resolve the issues with executable permissions error in Steam when trying to add a directory, be sure to close and/or restart Steam after doing this. This is just all how Valve sorted Steam to do SteamPipe for Source games for better management of installs and adding mods to games; https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamPipe

Daniil Lopatin
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  • I had a similar issue attempting to link with an alternate library on a separate mount. In my case, the library contained the capitalized SteamApps and creating a lowercased symlink fixed the problem. – SmileyChris Feb 10 '15 at 00:15
  • @SmileyChris If trying to load Steam games from a different mounted partition, say for example NTFS, it won't work, because Linux can't read or change the permissions it needs for that directory, and will only appear as Read-Only. –  May 01 '15 at 09:43
  • It was another Ext4 partition and definitely writable. I'm guessing for me it could have been an issue with an older steam binary creating the capitalized version of the symlink, and then it was changed in a more recent version. – SmileyChris May 07 '15 at 02:24
  • @user94959 Anyway to fix this? – Karl Morrison Dec 19 '15 at 16:05
  • For a library on a separate partition, I was able to rename the folder – homebrand May 15 '17 at 09:44