Steam Play games on external usb Flash drive

[Pawel (LINUX)]

Hello!

This week I managed to install elementary OS on my 2 in 1 laptop. Almost everything works great including steam, however "steam play" games works only on built in drive. On exertnal USB all native linux games works but not "steam play". Can you give me some advice??

with best regards
Pawel

---edit---
For your info - terminal shows nothing - only steam shows for 1-2sec "running" then everything stops...

[x_wing]

Did you test with a game that is platinum on protondb?

Edit: please add your system information

[Pawel (LINUX)]

Yes I tested platinium and gold games. All of them works on built in drive but not on external.


Computer Information:
Manufacturer: Unknown
Model: Unknown
Form Factor: Laptop
No Touch Input Detected

Processor Information:
CPU Vendor: GenuineIntel
CPU Brand: Intel(R) Atom(TM) x5-Z8500 CPU @ 1.44GHz
CPU Family: 0x6
CPU Model: 0x4c
CPU Stepping: 0x3
CPU Type: 0x0
Speed: 2240 Mhz
4 logical processors
4 physical processors
HyperThreading: Unsupported
FCMOV: Supported
SSE2: Supported
SSE3: Supported
SSSE3: Supported
SSE4a: Unsupported
SSE41: Supported
SSE42: Supported
AES: Supported
AVX: Unsupported
CMPXCHG16B: Supported
LAHF/SAHF: Supported
PrefetchW: Unsupported

Operating System Version:
elementary OS 5.0 Juno (64 bit)
Kernel Name: Linux
Kernel Version: 4.15.0-50-generic
X Server Vendor: The X.Org Foundation
X Server Release: 11906000
X Window Manager: Mutter(Gala)
Steam Runtime Version: jenkins-steam-runtime-beta-release_0.20190320.2

Video Card:
Driver: Intel Open Source Technology Center Mesa DRI Intel(R) HD Graphics (Cherrytrail) x86/MMX/SSE2
Driver Version: 3.0 Mesa 18.2.8
OpenGL Version: 3.0
Desktop Color Depth: 24 bits per pixel
Monitor Refresh Rate: 60 Hz
VendorID: 0x8086
DeviceID: 0x22b0
Revision Not Detected
Number of Monitors: 1
Number of Logical Video Cards: 1
Primary Display Resolution: 800 x 1280
Desktop Resolution: 1280 x 800
Primary Display Size: 8.31" x 13.35" (15.71" diag)
21.1cm x 33.9cm (39.9cm diag)
Primary VRAM Not Detected

Sound card:
Audio device: %s1

Memory:
RAM: 3838 Mb

Miscellaneous:
UI Language: English
LANG: pl_PL.UTF-8
Total Hard Disk Space Available: 44300 Mb
Largest Free Hard Disk Block: 10347 Mb
VR Headset: None detected

Recent Failure Reports:

[Nep Nep Neptune]

Is it formatted as FAT32, NTFS, or ext4? Steam play proton games don't seem to like being played on NTFS , and i wouldnt expect FAT32 or exFAT either. Ext4 will work but playing games off an external usb flash drive im not sure let alone an external hard drive for steam proton or native games.
Your built in drive waa formattef ext4 for linux so I would imagine they work well.

[Slow Joe Crow]

That's very weird, I've been running No Man's Sky (a gold game) since almost day one of Steam Play on an external USB drive. (https://pastebin.com/TUteEpG8) I'm doing it on an external USB mass storage with the original spinning media replaced with an SSD, so it doesn't present as a flash device such as mmcblk0, but it sounds similar to what's not working for you. :-/

[Pawel (LINUX)]

It is formatted as fat32, for this moment I prefer to try without formatting it to ext4.

[truboxl]

If you are running the SteamPlay games off an NTFS-formatted USB flash drive, you will need to do some workarounds

[Marlock]

Unfortunately complete support for FAT32 on Proton will likely never happen due to limitations of the format:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1402

Hello @KvaGram, the root cause of your issue was found on #2439. I've heard from a Proton dev that we are not going to support FAT32 due to the lack of support for symlinks and the max file size of 4GB. Please use a linux native filesystem for the best experience.

If you have follow up issues with a native filesystem, feel free open a new issue report and we can go from there.

Closing as the original issue tracked here is about running games with Proton on a FAT32 Steam library.

For many other kinds of software it might not pose a big issue, but for games (and more specifically proton) such limitations are hit too often and workarounds are really not trivial.

You could format the usb drive as ext4 (and install a 3rd party driver on windows to be able to use it there if you still have windows too).

[Pawel (LINUX)]

I can confirm that on ext4 external drive everything works... Thanks for trying everybody!

[Henrique Rissi]

Originally posted by ahmo:

If you are running the SteamPlay games off an NTFS-formatted USB flash drive, you will need to do some workarounds

Can you say what are these workarounds that need to be done? I'm having issues with a NTFS formatted USB HDD on openSUSE Tumbleweed, I'm almost going back to Ubuntu as I had no issues with the same setup... The only thing that keeps me on openSuse is its well implemented KDE... But could never use Steam on games that require photon, as I store them in my USB HDD... And for some reason every game that I try to launch (with no success) on openSUSE gets screwed when I go to Windows and need to be redownloaded.

[engie❤cat]

Originally posted by Henrique Rissi:

Can you say what are these workarounds that need to be done? I'm having issues with a NTFS formatted USB HDD on openSUSE Tumbleweed

the system should be mounted with ownership permissions of the current user, not just as default root with read/write permissions.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows