I’ve been cruising along on EOS on both of my laptops for a few months now. As a credit to this community, this is the first time I’ve felt completely unable to find a solution to what I’m trying to accomplish (though it seems like it should be a simple matter)
I recently installed a fresh WD Blue 1TB M.2 NVME drive into one of my laptops for the purpose of media and Steam library storage for both the EOS and Windows installs on the machine. I’m using the drive as a single partition. From what I’ve gathered for cross-platform compatibility, exFAT or NTFS are the best options for formatting and I have tried both in all of the following scenarios. I’ve had no problem figuring out how to partition the drive, and I’ve been getting my feet wet with fstab and successfully have it formatted and mounting at boot to where I want it to be, but that’s where my luck and rudimentary Linux knowledge has seemingly run out.
Upon getting it mounted the first time, I immediately tried to get Steam on Linux set to use a folder there instead of where it had been, and got the “New Steam library folder must be on a filesystem mounted with execute permissions” error. The solutions I’ve found for this are all suggesting adding “exec” to the fstab options, but unless I’m doing something wrong that doesn’t seem to have an effect.
Additionally, as far as day-to-day storage usage is concerned, I’m in a permissions snafu. Seemingly I can only write to the drive as root and I can’t figure out a way to use it as a user. Most tutorials I’ve seen for adding a hard drive to Linux mention to either use chown on the folder the drive is mounted to, or the “user” option in fstab, but neither seem to work. The fstab edit has no apparent effect, and attempting to “sudo chown” the target mount folder seems to have a weird result. With the drive unmounted, it works as expected and I can see the permissions readout change in my terminal. Upon mounting it either manually or at boot however, the permissions appear to revert back to root only. With the drive mounted, running sudo chown on it spits back “Operation not permitted”.
I feel like I’m chasing my tail troubleshooting this, any suggestions?
Current fstab entry for the drive looks like this:
UUID=E37E-EF91 /mnt/storage exfat rw,user,exec,dev,suid,auto,async,noatime 0 0
Did you try changing the owner and permissions of the /mnt/storage folder before mounting to that folder? Move rw and exec to the end of the options to ensure those take effect at the end?
I’ve had this issue before and I dont remember what the specific change was that fixed it for me.
Full current fstab (The line of the drive in question has changed as I’ve been tinkering more to no avail)
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a device; this may
# be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices that works even if
# disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
UUID=5523-67B3 /boot/efi vfat umask=0077 0 2
UUID=1550562f-1a61-46be-af96-f90452ee72ca swap swap defaults,noatime 0 0
UUID=7d292092-51cb-4bd6-bdd6-d3172c0e140b / ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1
UUID=b23c1f06-43f8-4464-ba88-d9eaa6b46a8c /home ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2
UUID=E62F-59A4 /mnt/data exfat user,noatime,rw,exec 0 2
I somehow hadn’t found that tutorial in my searches, but it still is giving me the same result. I can only work with the drive as root.
That’s what’s confusing me the most, I have indeed tried to set the permissions before mounting. I even started over with the step by step tutorial ricklinux linked above, and when checking permissions before mounting it is indeed owned by my user and has full rwx. Upon mounting however, the permissions change back to being owned by root and the user only has r-x. So I do seem to have execute privileges now, but I still don’t have any write privileges to put data on it in the first place.
Forum name is subbed for my actual user name, but otherwise yes that is the folder name I’m now using, triple checked. I changed the name from my original post after I started over with the tutorial you linked.
The clutter on nvme1n1 is the result of me removing the preinstalled Windows 11 but keeping its recovery partitions, installing Windows 10 with a recovery partition, and then installing EOS alongside that. It’s definitely a mess but everything on it works as expected. nvme0n1 is the new disk and is the only thing causing me issues.
In my brief testing, formatting a drive as vfat and mounting it, then changing the ownership to your user of the mountpoint, unmounting and remounting results in a drive the user can write to. Maybe it is a limitation of exfat?
I came across this:
Try adding uid=M,gid=N to the options where M is your user ID and N your group id (you can find these by running the command id in a terminal).
I didn’t have the option for vfat in gparted, but I went back thru the forum tutorial using NTFS instead and it works as expected. Seems it might indeed be something involving exfat that was causing the problem!
