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kshelton

Member

Registered: 2020-09-19

Posts: 7

Map New SSD for Steam

I'm trying to mount my new SSD for Steam games but I cannot get the application to see the folder.
I formatted the drive with ext4 so there are no NTFS hurdles to deal with.
I am mounting /dev/sdb1 to a games folder on root. My user is the owner of the games folder and users is the group owner.

Here are the permissions for the directory.
drwxrwxrwx   3 $user users  4096 Sep 20 22:57 games
Here are the mount settings in /etc/fstab
UUID=de4fca8f-360a-4967-8b26-fe5a2a893241 /games ext4 nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0

After running blkid again I have confirmed that the UUID is correct. I am able to create files in the /games directory. Steam is just unable to see it.

Thanks in advance for any help.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,363

Re: Map New SSD for Steam

What does "not see it" mean exactly where are you looking? You need to add a new library path for most relevant consideration purposes. Also if you are using the flatpak version, try the one in the repos.

kshelton

Member

Registered: 2020-09-19

Posts: 7

Re: Map New SSD for Steam

Thanks for the response.

When going into Steam/Settings/Downloads and adding a new Library folder. The folder games is not an option to select.

It also doesn't show me an option for create new steam library on /games which was something I thought I may see as well going by the videos I have watched. So it seems that Steam does not have the necessary permissions to see the directory. There is no Steam user or group to give access to the directory and I am the owner.

To install steam, I uncommented out the
[multilib]
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
in the /etc/pacman.conf file.

and installed via sudo pacman -S steam.

I did not use flatpak.

Found some more info and change fstab options to this. defaults,auto,rw,nofail 0 1 but Steam is still unable to see the folder.

Last edited by kshelton (2020-09-20 14:25:01)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,363

Re: Map New SSD for Steam

I don't think there's any magic at play here, if your user can see the folder steam should be able to too and this works just fine here (... steam shouldn't know, or care that that's actually a different harddrive): What's your output for

stat /games #Maybe from both an unmounted and mounted state, though afaik it shouldn't matter if the mounted path is correct as whatever is below should be masked by the mount
mount

Are you sure you aren't just searching at the wrong place? Steam defaults to open up a tree view with the /home/.steam folder open by default when adding the library path, make sure you collapse that so you don't have to search through a huge list.

Last edited by V1del (2020-09-21 09:42:41)

Wild Penguin

Member

Registered: 2015-03-19

Posts: 406

Re: Map New SSD for Steam

Are you sure you aren't just searching at the wrong place? Steam defaults to open up a tree view with the /home/.steam folder open by default when adding the library path, make sure you collapse that so you don't have to search through a huge list.

This is my thoughts also. Steam can indeed "see" the whole directory tree here, one can try to create a library folder anywhere the user can read. I just checked this and this is literally the case, one can (for example) even try to create a library anywhere in /proc (but that would/should of course fail because of missing write permissions).

Steam UI can be confusing at times, it is not the best thing I've seen out there. Post a screenshot of the Steam tree view to make sure we are all looking at the same thing.

kshelton

Member

Registered: 2020-09-19

Posts: 7

Re: Map New SSD for Steam

I'm not sure what was going on. I finally just removed Steam and installed again. Now, when I go into Steam it sees the location just fine.

I did something along the way somewhere to mess this up. Just wish I knew what it was.

Thanks everyone for your responses.

First time caller...long time listener hehe.