[Help] Unable to move files in External Hard Drive.

[[Melons] Taphyll]

When I plug in my external hard drive to the Steam Deck it recognizes the device and I can view and open up files inside of the drive. However I cannot move or rename the files inside of the hard drive. This is strange since when I move it back to my windows PC the drive functions normally. Is there something I'm missing out on?

[AD]

Might be a filesystem issue. Windows uses a proprietary filesystem called NTFS. Linux supports it by reverse engineering it (kind of how the Steam Deck can run Windows games). The downside of this is that the NTFS drivers might be more limited in what they can do, and I think some drivers had the exact limitation you're talking about. But I think that there is a newer driver that doesn't, at least I know that I've used an NTFS drive from Linux before without this problem, so it might depend on what driver Steam OS using (though it should be noted I could be remembering things incorrectly and maybe the old drivers didn't have that limitation, in which case I have no idea).

You could use ext4 instead, which is what Linux generally uses. However, do not that Windows has no support for ext4 at all, so if you did that then you wouldn't be able to use the drive in Windows. An alternative is using a Fat filesystem, which is supported by both operating systems but is more limited and more prone to corruption I believe.

[WarnerCK]

Originally posted by AD:

Might be a filesystem issue.

Not so much a filesystem issue as a permissions issue caused by their choice of filesystem. Linux filesystems store user/group/other permissions for read/write/execute per-file. Windows filesystems can't store those permissions, so they have to be set for the whole filesystem at mount time. Owned by root and read-only for others is what it sounds like OP is using.

[AD]

Originally posted by WarnerCK:

Originally posted by AD:

Might be a filesystem issue.

Not so much a filesystem issue as a permissions issue caused by their choice of filesystem. Linux filesystems store user/group/other permissions for read/write/execute per-file. Windows filesystems can't store those permissions, so they have to be set for the whole filesystem at mount time. Owned by root and read-only for others is what it sounds like OP is using.

I think Windows technically also store permissions like that (I've seen a permissions tab in explorer at least), but I don't know how compatible it is with Linux since it was developed for Windows, so you might be on to something. I don't think it's much of a choice to use NTFS if you're using Windows and have used to drive with Windows before getting your deck, though.

OP, if you open up the permissions tab for your external harddrive, what does it say? You can get to it by right clicking on a folder or file on the drive (or on the steam deck I guess it would be L2 a foler or file in desktop mode), click "properties" and then "permissions".

[notboxbot]

Originally posted by Lauren:

Another "if they had just gone with Windows we wouldn't be having these issues"... Many such cases.

An yet many, many people are happy with their Deck.
It seems not everybody is as technologically incompetent as you...
Why don't you just STFU?

[PopinFRESH]

Originally posted by < blank >:

When I plug in my external hard drive to the Steam Deck it recognizes the device and I can view and open up files inside of the drive. However I cannot move or rename the files inside of the hard drive. This is strange since when I move it back to my windows PC the drive functions normally. Is there something I'm missing out on?

Depending on the size of the drive, the file sizes, and file names you can re-format it with a filesystem that both Windows and Linux can access as read/write such as FAT32 or exFAT. In general exFAT should work for most cases but still has the limitation of filenames being limited to 255 characters.

EDIT: Note, reformatting the filesystem will destroy the data on the current filesystem so make sure you've backed up anything you want from that drive before reformatting it.

Originally posted by AD:

Originally posted by WarnerCK:

Not so much a filesystem issue as a permissions issue caused by their choice of filesystem. Linux filesystems store user/group/other permissions for read/write/execute per-file. Windows filesystems can't store those permissions, so they have to be set for the whole filesystem at mount time. Owned by root and read-only for others is what it sounds like OP is using.

I think Windows technically also store permissions like that (I've seen a permissions tab in explorer at least), but I don't know how compatible it is with Linux since it was developed for Windows, so you might be on to something. I don't think it's much of a choice to use NTFS if you're using Windows and have used to drive with Windows before getting your deck, though.

OP, if you open up the permissions tab for your external harddrive, what does it say? You can get to it by right clicking on a folder or file on the drive (or on the steam deck I guess it would be L2 a foler or file in desktop mode), click "properties" and then "permissions".

Both WarnerCK and you are pretty much correct. NTFS does store per-file permissions, however, they are not POSIX file system object permission model compliant and use their own permissions model. The POSIX file system object permissions model stores permissions in a standard bit structure on the file. NTFS uses the Windows Access Control Entries (Windows ACE) to store file reference and permissions at the filesystem level rather than the file level.

[AD]

Originally posted by PopinFRESH:

Originally posted by < blank >:

When I plug in my external hard drive to the Steam Deck it recognizes the device and I can view and open up files inside of the drive. However I cannot move or rename the files inside of the hard drive. This is strange since when I move it back to my windows PC the drive functions normally. Is there something I'm missing out on?

Depending on the size of the drive, the file sizes, and file names you can re-format it with a filesystem that both Windows and Linux can access as read/write such as FAT32 or exFAT. In general exFAT should work for most cases but still has the limitation of filenames being limited to 255 characters.

EDIT: Note, reformatting the filesystem will destroy the data on the current filesystem so make sure you've backed up anything you want from that drive before reformatting it.

Originally posted by AD:

I think Windows technically also store permissions like that (I've seen a permissions tab in explorer at least), but I don't know how compatible it is with Linux since it was developed for Windows, so you might be on to something. I don't think it's much of a choice to use NTFS if you're using Windows and have used to drive with Windows before getting your deck, though.

OP, if you open up the permissions tab for your external harddrive, what does it say? You can get to it by right clicking on a folder or file on the drive (or on the steam deck I guess it would be L2 a foler or file in desktop mode), click "properties" and then "permissions".

Both WarnerCK and you are pretty much correct. NTFS does store per-file permissions, however, they are not POSIX file system object permission model compliant and use their own permissions model. The POSIX file system object permissions model stores permissions in a standard bit structure on the file. NTFS uses the Windows Access Control Entries (Windows ACE) to store file reference and permissions at the filesystem level rather than the file level.

Interesting, didn't know that. Don't know that much about filesystems I'm afraid. Question. Is there anything preventing Linux from being able to use Windows ACE when dealing with NTFS?

[PopinFRESH]

Originally posted by AD:

Interesting, didn't know that. Don't know that much about filesystems I'm afraid. Question. Is there anything preventing Linux from being able to use Windows ACE when dealing with NTFS?

Other than it not being POSIX compliant, not really. You'd need something akin to Wine/Proton to add the proprietary filesystem structure and permissions structure and a translation to POSIX compliant file handling. There are some user space tools like NTFS-3G which allow some basic file manipulation on NTFS, however, that is going to be relatively cumbersome to implement on SteamOS considering you'd need to install the supporting libraries which would require unsealing the immutable filesystem, etc. which will get broken on future SteamOS updates.

SteamOS 3.4 might end up with some improved native support for NTFS as that should move to a Linux 5.15 based kernel which should have native NTFS kernel support baked in a la Paragon Software's NTFS3 implementation.

[[Melons] Taphyll]

Originally posted by AD:

Originally posted by WarnerCK:

Not so much a filesystem issue as a permissions issue caused by their choice of filesystem. Linux filesystems store user/group/other permissions for read/write/execute per-file. Windows filesystems can't store those permissions, so they have to be set for the whole filesystem at mount time. Owned by root and read-only for others is what it sounds like OP is using.

OP, if you open up the permissions tab for your external harddrive, what does it say? You can get to it by right clicking on a folder or file on the drive (or on the steam deck I guess it would be L2 a foler or file in desktop mode), click "properties" and then "permissions".

It says

• Owner: Can view & modify content.
  
• Group: Can view & modify content.
  
• Others: Can view & modify content.

[Konkey Dong]

anyone find a solution?