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#1 2026-02-26 18:30:04
- FloppyFishGaming
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[SOLVED] Secondary drive not being written to from Steam
I am trying to use an external drive (sda2) to use as a Steam library since my nvme isn't cutting it anymore. I added the secondary drive to my fstab and mounted it to a directory in my home folder - I mounted it here because if I create a directory for it in /mnt -- Steam doesn't have the permission to write into it. I even made sure to make sda2 ext4 since Steam AND Linux do not play nice with NTFS.
I noticed when installing games to the folder I mounted sda2 to, it was actually taking up space on nvme0n1p2 - which is my root partition.
This is my output for lsblk -f
NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sda
├─sda1 vfat FAT32 WINTOUSB DA96-C104
└─sda2 ext4 1.0 3bf6150e-252c-4032-b2d7-7e85f17e6db8
And this is my fstab
# /dev/sda2
UUID=3bf6150e-252c-4032-b2d7-7e85f17e6db8 /home/ash/LTS ext4 nofail,noexec,nosuid,nodev,x-systemd.device-timeout=5 0 2
I want to be able to install games onto sda2, that is all I ask, I've been scrubbing forums and the wiki for hours to no avail.
SOLUTION: I mounted the drive to it's own folder in /mnt/<drive name> instead of my /home folder.
Then I used chmod -R to make sure my user had all permissions.
Then Finally, edited the fstab so that we're no longer using the noexec option, in favor of exec AND defining the user and group with UID and GID found by using the id command. It should look like this:
# /dev/sda2
UUID=3bf6150e-252c-4032-b2d7-7e85f17e6db8 /mnt/LTS ext4 nofail,exec,nosuid,nodev,uid=1000,gid=1000,x-systemd.device-timeout=5 0 2
Last edited by FloppyFishGaming (2026-02-26 21:12:22)
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#2 2026-02-26 18:40:34
- Scimmia
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Re: [SOLVED] Secondary drive not being written to from Steam
That doesn't add up at all. That's a different UUID and a different mount point, how is it getting mounted?
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#3 2026-02-26 18:48:16
- FloppyFishGaming
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Re: [SOLVED] Secondary drive not being written to from Steam
That doesn't add up at all. That's a different UUID and a different mount point, how is it getting mounted?
My bad, I confused this with another USB drive I'm using. I've updated my post to reflect it (sda2 - not sdb2).
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#4 2026-02-26 18:53:43
- mpan
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- Registered: 2012-08-01
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Re: [SOLVED] Secondary drive not being written to from Steam
Assuming “/home/ash/LTS” is the directory you want to use, it sounds like the partition is never mounted and Steam just writes to a directory “/home/ash/LTS” on your root filesystem, not to the intended filesystem.
Why it’s not being mounted should be visible in the journal. Search for messages related to “3bf6150e-252c-4032-b2d7-7e85f17e6db8” or “sda2”.
Last edited by mpan (2026-02-26 18:55:49)
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#5 2026-02-26 19:21:47
- FloppyFishGaming
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- Registered: 2026-02-26
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Re: [SOLVED] Secondary drive not being written to from Steam
Assuming “/home/ash/LTS” is the directory you want to use, it sounds like the partition is never mounted and Steam just writes to a directory “/home/ash/LTS” on your root filesystem, not to the intended filesystem.
Why it’s not being mounted should be visible in the journal. Search for messages related to “3bf6150e-252c-4032-b2d7-7e85f17e6db8” or “sda2”.
Solved that issue, it must have been a failing USB port as switching it to another one works. I can tell it's reading the sda2 partition now that it's claiming to have the propper 1.8TB of free space, instead of the ~130MB. Now that's taken care of, I've ran into a new issue. While trying to install a game to it I get a disk write error. I have given my user read and write permissions, and this is NOT flatpak Steam. I opened Steam in bash and recreated the issue, no error message in the console.
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#6 2026-02-26 21:05:53
- seth
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- Registered: 2012-09-03
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Re: [SOLVED] Secondary drive not being written to from Steam
While trying to install a game to it I get a disk write error. I have given my user read and write permissions, and this is NOT flatpak Steam. I opened Steam in bash and recreated the issue, no error message in the console.
Wrt your edit ~1h after that post: is this still the case?
If so, what's the exact error you get?
If not, please always remember to mark resolved threads by editing your initial posts subject - so others will know that there's no task left, but maybe a solution to find.
Thanks.
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