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.

  • daggermoon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 hour 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.

  • Drathro@dormi.zoneEnglish
    9·
    14 hours ago

    This might be due to windows hibernation behavior. When you shut down windows 10 and 11, it actually hibernates the drive instead of a full shutdown. You can disable it by turning off “fast startup” option(s). I haven’t had to do it in a while so I can’t recall exactly where the option lives. Hibernated drives get marked to prevent writing to them as it may corrupt the windows install.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      6·
      13 hours ago

      Oh, yeah, $ man mount.ntfs mentions that:

        Windows hibernation and fast restarting
   On computers which  can  be  dual-booted  into  Windows  or
   Linux,  Windows  has  to  be fully shut down before booting
   into Linux, otherwise the NTFS  file  systems  on  internal
   disks may be left in an inconsistent state and changes made
   by Linux may be ignored by Windows.

   So,  Windows  may  not be left in hibernation when starting
   Linux, in order to  avoid  inconsistencies.  Moreover,  the
   fast  restart  feature  available on recent Windows systems
   has to be disabled. This can be achieved by issuing  as  an
   Administrator  the  Windows command which disables both hi‐
   bernation and fast restarting :

          powercfg /h off

   If either Windows is hibernated or its fast restart is  en‐
   abled,  partitions  on  internal  disks  are  forced  to be
   mounted in read-only mode.

      And then:

         remove_hiberfile
          When the NTFS volume  is  hibernated,  a  read-write
          mount is denied and a read-only mount is forced. One
          needs either to resume Windows and shutdown it prop‐
          erly,  or use this option which will remove the Win‐
          dows hibernation file. Please note, this means  that
          the  saved  Windows session will be completely lost.
          Use this option under your own responsibility.

      Good catch. If you’re right about this being the cause, then my suggestion above about mounting read-write will probably just result in another read-only mount (though I bet that mount.ntfs will print something about a read-only mount being forced in the console).

      Good odds that OP just needs to fully shut down Windows, rather than suspending it.

        • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
          2·
          12 hours ago

          Lemmy’s Web UI does something wonky and nonstandard with Markdown backtick-surrounded monospaced text. I assume that it’s some attempt to pretty-print code or something that nobody wants. Doing the four-space indent gets monospaced text and avoids it, but then you can’t do it inline with proportional text.

          I just ignore the colorization. Hopefully someday they’ll just get rid of it.

    • biofaust@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      31·
      13 hours ago

      I am going to specify in the body of the post that this is a drive I used as library drive only for Steam, it is not the one holding the Windows boot.

      Would that change things?

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        3·
        13 hours ago

        I haven’t run into this myself, but from the mount.ntfs man page snippet I listed below, it doesn’t sound like it; it references “partitions”, so I don’t think that it’s just the system partition in Windows that’s affected.

  • stuner@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    13 hours 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.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
      2·
      5 hours ago

      Seconded, only pain do you find. I even tried with an exfat drive on the side, but that had it’s own pile of headaches. Don’t try to. Perfectly fine dual booting, but just pick and choose on Linux until you’re reading to fully switch.

  • cm0002@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    13 hours 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

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      2·
      13 hours ago

      It looks like the ntfs-3g FUSE driver does have write support for NTFS (and just confirmed it when responding to @Drathro@dormi.zone below) NTFS is also, like most Linux filesystems, a journaling filesystem, which means that power loss on a mounted filesystem isn’t going to corrupt the filesystem, whereas FAT is not.

      • cm0002@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        13 hours ago

        It does look like there has been major improvements since the last time I tried this kind of shenanigans. Which admittedly has been many years, these days I just don’t bother with dual booting so I’m free to just use the native FS wherever needed for the OS I’m using OR I have an intermediary like a SAN or it’s on a VM or something

        Still though, using a non-native FS in this manner is always more headaches than it’s worth, the no journaling is a corruption risk true, but so is using a non-native FS just in different ways lol

        IMO, the use case for this drive is storing re-downloadable data is perfectly fine for exFAT, worst case it corrupts and you have to redownload games from steam

    • biofaust@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      13 hours 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·
        13 hours 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

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    4·
    13 hours ago

    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.

    When you run $ mount, you probably see something like this:

    ntfs on /media/<username>/Gaming type ntfs (ro,<...>)

    If so, that entire filesystem is mounted read-only (hence the “ro” flag). chown (and what you probably wanted, chmod) isn’t going to affect that. It alters ownership and permissions on files and directories within a filesystem.

    I have no idea what Disks is, but I assume that it’s some kind of graphical utility.

    I’d probably try doing this, which will only affect the current mount; it won’t persistent to the next boot:

    # mount -o remount,rw /media/<username>/Gaming

    That’ll try and remount the thing read-write.

    If that resolves the issue, then the issue is going to indeed be that it’s mounted read-only.

    I suspect that there’s probably an option in this Disks thing to mount it read-write. I have never seen the thing, so I can’t give any advice there.

    If you want to stick it in /etc/fstab and mount it at boot, if you let me see the line you get back from mount above, maybe censoring the username, I can probably tell you what to put there.

    EDIT: It looks like the preferred NTFS driver is the FUSE ntfs-3g, not the kernel ntfs or ntfs3. According to the linked page, Debian apparently doesn’t build their kernels by default with the ntfs kernel driver anyway, so I assume that Linux Mint Debian Edition probably also does the same. So it’ll probably read something like “fuse.ntfs-3g”, not “ntfs”.