My second drive in computer is un allocated. What type of partition table should I use? In the past I used msdos. Is this the right type?
gpt is almost always what you want
I made a gpt partition table, and a ext4 partition. What I don t get is gparted made root the owner. I don t have write permissions unless I enter the root pass. I think I remember gparted always made the user owner of any drive I ever allocated. I started installing my steam games on the second drive, but now I wonder if it will even work once a game starts.
You can change the ownership after you mount it.
New partitions always start out owned by root.
The way it is now is I have to manually enter root pass for drive before I open steam so steam can access drive. I just tried it, and it shows the installed games. If I dont no games show as installed.
Did you add a mount for it in /etc/fstab?
It is a permanent drive so you don’t need to automount it.
Nope. I have never learned about mount points. I should probably read up on the subject.
It all seems pretty straight forward. My only thought is it sort of already has a mount point if I enter the root pass, and that is where steam looks for the games already installed, so it seems to me that I should enter that same mount point in the fstab file. Does that sound right?
Hi Sempter!
I will give you my answer on how I do things, not because it’s the “right way” or the “best way” but because I am also not super technical 
so I am always re-reading the guides and suggestions and following them step by step. So far, haven’t had major issues or breakages.
First off, I see you were having like 2 problems in 1.
Let me tell you have I have my rig: I have 4 disks in total. 1 NVMe SSD, 2 SATA SSDs and 1 HDD. 1 of the SSDs is to dual-boot windows for work so, discount that.
The other sata SSD is the one that holds the system; HDD is for purposes and the NVMe SSD is the one I used for games on Steam. Obviously, NVMe SSD is plugged into the M.2 port on the motherboard.
After creating a partition table and formatting it (as I said, I’m not technical nor fancy and don’t have several pcs and time to tinker with stuff, so everything is ext4 because why not) the first thing I always do is checking my system recognizes the drive. Usually it’s unmounted; You click to mount (in Dolphin, as I use KDE) and it will ask you for your password to do so. But, there will be permissions stuff happening and also… I don’t wanna mount manually every time I boot into the system! It’s supposed to be a permanent drive.
That’s where this amazing guide in Discovery comes in! - Following all the steps should be ok but lately I have found out that sometimes doing it exactly wasn’t working for me (it’s literally 1 detail that I can’t remember now sincerely sorry, but for the most part is great).
Now you can reboot (if you want, for good measure) and see if the disk is recognized and automounts, as well as you have permissions to read and write into it. If it works then everything is fine.
The last part is Steam. It depends on if you are using the Flatpak or the system-installed version (regular binary, not the native). If you are using the system one, you have to go to steam settings and “create” a library for steam on the new disk. For this I think you have to generate the folder appropriately in the drive and then select it from a file browser inside Steam (it’s been a while since I installed my system so memories are fuzzy).
In the case you are using the Flatpak, you need to give the sandboxed app permissions to access your system’s files (in this case, drive). Steam Flatpak solves a bunch of issues that System one can have but also introduces some friction in certain parts. In this case, I suggest you download “Flatseal”, it’s a great GUI tool to give the Flatpaks different permissions. Once you do this and it’s saved, you SHOULD be able to get into Steam again, and for Steam to find the disk, be able to select it and read/write to it as well.
I am not sure if I helped you in anyway but hopefully I did!
I have found that when I add a new drive I give it a name that way when I look in dolphin it shows up. On this computer I have a drive named Files and it shows in dolphin as files.I made myself the owner by using
chown $USER:$USER /path/to/folder
chmod ugo+rwx /path/to/folder
which in my case /Files is the path and I am the owner and and part of the group
You can also install gnome-disk-utility and do all of that from there by clicking on the drive and the settings button for the drive. Under mount options click mount at startup and above mount point add defaults if not already added.When you are done click ok and it will save that to fstab. Other than the uuid which will be different on yours this is how my fstab looks for the drive Files.
UUID=************** /Files xfs defaults 0 0
I ended up using the same mount point the system created when I entered password. Steam can now see the games I already installed, and no more password dialog box. I m in like Flint 