Can't launch games from External SSD (Linux)

[Chaosolous]

Hey guys, gotta question for you.

I've been using Linux for a bit now and not had too many issues but I've been playing games off my internal SSD. I just plugged my external SSD that I usually keep my games on and installed a few games.

The games on the SSD won't launch though. If I hit the PLAY button on those games on the External, it'll just say "Launching" then it'll just do nothing and go back to a green PLAY button, like nothing happened.

I'm thinking it's because of the format of the SSD possibly? The games will launch fine if I move them over to my internal SSD, so it's an issue with this drive.

The drive worked fine on Windows. It's formatted to NTSF or whatever it is, should I format it to a different format or is there something else going on?

For the record, I did re-format the drive to NTSF (clearing it so it's fresh for Linux basically) right before I swapped my OS last week. Should I/Do I need to reformat this external drive to something else so it works with Linux?

I prefer to keep my games on an external SSD because my internal drive is only 500GB.

Does anyone know what's going on?

PC specs for reference:

Linux Mint (latest)
RTX 3060
i5 11400f
32GB RAM

[Omega]

Reformat the drive to something other than NTFS.

If the drive is only used on Linux systems you can format it with Ext4. If the drive is also used with Windows or Mac you can format it with exFAT.

[Chaosolous]

Origineel geplaatst door BlackBloodRum:

Couple of things come to mind:
- The NTFS aspect probably isn't helping, I've never tried running games on Linux from NTFS personally, but I do know NTFS support on Linux isn't ideal. If you can I'd suggest using EXT4 or another filesystem that is more suited to Linux, if formatting isn't a concern.
- It could also be an access issue, do you use the Flatpak version of steam? Is the Flatpak able to access the library on the SSD?
- Run steam and a game from the SSD from the terminal - it might spit more information out as to what is happening.

I don't think I'm using the Steam Flatpak, I downloaded it directly from the Software Manager that Mint came with.

I'll be honest, my terminal skills are sub par, it's why I've been using Mint, haha. I'll look into how to launch a game from there and see if it helps.

[Chaosolous]

Origineel geplaatst door Omega:

Reformat the drive to something other than NTFS.

If the drive is only used on Linux systems you can format it with Ext4. If the drive is also used with Windows or Mac you can format it with exFAT.

Okay, I'll give that a try as well.

Thank you.

[Chaosolous]

Awesome. Thanks for the help guys. I'll give these a try once I get home tonight.

[r.linder]

The issue is the NTFS partition, it needs to be something like ext4, brtfs, something that Linux uses, so you're going to have to reformat

[Chaosolous]

Okay. I’ll reformat the drive tonight. I had used exFat before on this drive when I had Windows but it caused installing games to take forever because it’d spend like 3 hours “allocating disk space“

I’ll give the ext4 a try.

[Chaosolous]

Yeah, swapping the drive from NTFS to Ext4 fixed it and everything is working as intended again.

Thanks for the help everyone, genuinely appreciate it.