I have all my games installed on an NTFS partition on external drives, and they install/play games from them on windows fine. Additionally when in steam on linux I can see the game library and start downloads from steam off the external drive. However after random segments of times the external drive will “disconnect” or “lose write access”, and steam freezes or gives an error about write access to the disk.
On 2 separate attempts now I have gotten Nioh to 50% installed on the first attempt, than 80% on the 2nd attempt, both ended up freezing steam completely and I had to “safely” remove the disk than uplug it, steam will unfreeze and I plug the disk back in and attempt again. I’ve tried deleting the download cache and relogin to no prevail.
Has anyone ran into this? I’d really rather not format the disks to ext4 because I dual-boot windows 11 and still want to use disks on both sides.
Linux will remount a drive as read-only after some kinds of errors.
This can be caused by a defective USB cable or USB connector or perhaps a defect in the electronics in the box.
Reformatting to “ext4” is not likely to fix this problem.
No worries I can just download them via steam on windows than start em in Linux. Thank you for getting back to me on it!
Then there is also the possibility that your NTFS file system is not properly unmounted by Windows. You should switch off in Windows the “fast boot” (or how it is called, I do not use Windows).
One thing to note is that you may not want to download the games from Linux, if you plan to play them on Windows as well.
There might be Linux specific builds for some games which Windows won’t be able to work with. On the other hand, most Windows builds work fine on Linux thanks to Proton. (One way to circumvent this might be to set the game properties → compatibility tool to some Proton version when downloading on Linux. This should download the Windows version of that game and run it through Proton, even when a Linux build is available.)
Understood, I’ll go with that route, thank you!
I did have fast boot enabled, I just hopped over to the Windows 11 side and safely removed the disk and uplugged it. I’ll try and see if I have any more issues, if so is there a software or utility to check external disk read/write access and assist with disconnects?
First, I never use Windows and have minimal to no knowledge of it.
What I understood from earlier (already some years) threads is that Windows has a “fast boot” or similar wording. When that is in use, it’s file systems are not completely and clean unmounted (or how they call that in Windows) at shutdown. The result is that Linux detects that and takes the precaution to mount it read-only. You can see that reported in the logs. Of course when you “safely remove” the file system in Windows before shutdown, all is OK.
In all cases in those old threads, switching off that “fast boot” in Windows removes the problem.
Often this is also a setting directly in the UEFI Bios (most modern mainboards have this setting). Also check there…