BE AWARE, THIS IS A NEW DRIVER AND THERE MAY BE SOME POTENTIAL FOR CORRUPTION. There isnt any ive heard of yet but you have been warned
This is a guide based on the Valve version of how to share an NTFS drive for Steam. This uses the new NTFS3 driver instead of the slower NTFS-3G but if you want to use the old one follow here
First you need to make a mount point for your games disk/drive. This can be w.e you want the mount point to be but this example is just one option.
sudo mkdir /media/gamedisk
Find your UID and GIU, both are 1000 on default
UID
id -u
GID
id -g
Find what the disk is labeled as (I.E /dev/sda2) and its UUID
Partition label
sudo fdisk -l
UUID (I.E output /dev/sda2: UUID=“38CE9483CE943AD8” TYPE=“ntfs” )
sudo blkid
Edit your Fstab to mount the partition
sudo nano /etc/fstab
at the bottom add the following, change it to match your uuid,etc. based on previous info as this is just an example (needs to be all one line not 2 separate like this one formats to for some reason. (changing UUID, uid, and gid where needed)
UUID=38CE9483CE943AD8 /media/gamesdisk ntfs3 rw,uid=1000,gid=1000,noatime,prealloc 0 0
prealloc isnt needed afaik on SSDs its mostly for hard drives to reduce fragmentation so if its an SSD you can omit prealloc but it shouldnt hurt anything. it is required that the type be “ntfs3” for it to use the new driver not just ntfs.
Now reboot your system to mount the drive.
Preventing drive corruption
as per warning from Valve
THERE HAS BEEN A REPORT THAT THIS MAY CAUSE DATA LOSS
This step IS NOT OPTIONAL
Proton creates files with characters that Windows cant read and causes windows to think the drive is corrupted when it isnt.
Create a symlink from the /compatdata folder on Linux to the mounted NTFS disk.
mkdir -p ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata (skip this is campatdata already exists)
ln -s ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata /media/gamedisk/Steam/steamapps/
If the /compatdata folder already exists on the mounted disk BEFORE the symlink, DELETE IT!
Now you may notice if you attempt to browse the symlink in Nautilus for example the link appears to not work. but if you navigate to it in terminal
I.E
cd /media/gamedisk/Steam/steamapps/compatdata
Then the symlink works fine. and all the data thats in your compatadata folder in the home directory will be listed when you run
ls
The umask=000 is removed and options that ntfs-3g uses but not ntfs3 are also. umask=000 seems to break symlinks as when i tested it on a friends system it didnt work, I could just be stupid but it doesnt appear to be needed any longer.
Using this new drive has been shown so far in my testing with a friends system to fix game breakage when using NTFS drives
current games tested now working over NTFS that didnt before
No Mans Sky
Dying Light