I saw this post on reddit and im banned there so I figured I’d post here for anyone who sees this and considers it.
I’ve directly tried this before, it was close to a year ago though or maybe longer so maybe things changed. But I’ve noticed when you try to launch a game that was previously running through wine on windows instead, it can completely stop the game from launching with wine in the future unless you reinstall the game (or maybe change install drive in steam?) or do some other fix im unaware of.
That’s not a problem for everyone, if you just wanna use that specific game only on windows then you’re fine, but i thought this should still be kept in mind in case people decide to do this to compare performance etc.
and also in order to run games off an ntfs drive you just need to set drive permissions in your fstab. Im on the shitter rn so maybe once im back at my pc ill grab the options and edit them into this. Sometimes the drive will stop giving proper access to it and all you need to do is run fsck on the windows drive then it should work on linux properly again its just some dumb windows shit.
EDIT: uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=022,fmask=133 these are the options to add to your fstab, replace uid and gid with your user id and group id of your user account. after that games should work fine on ntfs.
i used to have an entire drive that was ntfs just to store stuff between windows and linux now its just bcache formatted to xfs though cuz i never touch windows really.
Would just add, while you can change the permissions on NTFS drives in Linux, I’d generally recommend using a Linux dedicated partition (Ext4 for example) for games. It’s faster and also much less likely to cause unexpected issues.
Yeah no, I disagree with you and agree with the Reddit post. I had games in my NTFS drive when I fully swapped Linux and they stood there for a year because I’m lazy and they ran fine, but taking the time to copy them to another brtfs drive, format the NTFS one to brtfs and swap them back, then reconfigure steam to rediscover the games sped up their performances because while the NTFS translation layer works incredibly well for what it’s doing, using an actual Linux native dusk format is just better.
You fuckup is probably because you didn’t do the swap correctly, yet your recommendation is to not attempt the swap instead of doing it correctly.
For others that are thinking of doing this, move everything to a different drive temporarily, then format, then move everything back. On steam, remove the steam library from the drive and add it again. If there were any issues during the swaps steam will realise on the check it does when reading the steal library of that drive, and prompt you to download whatever it finds faulty.
uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=022,fmask=133
You can very easily fuck up your NTFS filesystem and make it unmountable in Windows. Would anyone be surprised to learn that not even Windows is fully compliant with the NTFS specifications? Some characters, like
:, are valid for NTFS filenames, but illegal in Windows, and if you create such a file (e.g. in a wineprefix’sdosdevices), Windows will refuse to mount it. Ask me how I know.The solution is to specify the
windows_namesoption every time you mount the filesystem, both infstaband when usingmount.ntfs.if i could pin this i would i never had that problem cuz i never did that but thats pretty funny idk anything about the windows_names option though like you just set that option it doesnt have a variable or anything?
The option doesn’t have a value. You just need to specify that the option should be present, e.g.
defaults,noatime,windows_names,uid=1000,gid=1000in fstab, ormount.ntfs -o noatime,windows_names,uid=1000,gid=1000for manual mounts.This comment on the UDisks github page elaborates on why the
ntfs-3gdriver does not automatically restrict the usable characters.UDisks itself does mount NTFS volumes with the
windows_namesoption, and the last comment in the same thread explains why enforcing that restriction with no way to opt out is a breaking change for some users.
Good point. Don’t dual boot. It’s only a matter of time till Windows borks up your MBR. Go full Linux.
MBR
If you still have an MBR you have bigger issues. Working with ESPs in a GPT partitioned disk is much more stable.
It is actually impressive how Windows Update not only breaks Windows, but also other OSes on completely different drives
(Yes it broke my dual booted Linux, and then somehow even broke Linux again even after I moved it to a completely separate drive)
How about dual boot, but the Windows OS is never online?
I used to be Linux only, but after I’ve got a new machine with Win11 preinstalled, I went dual boot " justfor now until I got all my apps running on Linux". Well, it’s been a while and I still didn’t figure out how to run some apps, so dual boot turned out to be a bit more permanent.
However, since I don’t have WiFi and Windows starts sucking my mobile data once connected, I established a strict ‘Windows must never be connected to my hotspot’ policy. So it never updates.
I still plan to go back to Linux only, because I just like open source and dislike Windows for spyware and thinking it would be smarter than the user (which in my case is probably true, but still, I take my pride in being able to screw up my own OS if I make a mistake). But at the moment I’m out of ideas for certain things not running on Linux, so my machine is still punished with a secundary Win OS.
What if they’re on separate disks?
I have dual booted since 2004 and this has never happened to me. Since 2016 I also didn’t take any precautions like I used to.
this has in fact happened i fixed it so it didnt cause any problems but it was definitely fuckin annoying
I dual booted for a year before this happened twice in the span of one month. Windows literally just deleted the fucking drive partitions with linux.
Nuked that shit OS in an instant.
I never would have even considered that as an option… though I left dual booting behind about 2 years ago and haven’t looked back.
I have Windows in a VM, I can count the number of times I’ve booted it this year on one hand and one of those was just for updating it.
Yeah same here. I built a new PC for Linux and kept my old Windows machine on hot standby and even hooked it up to a KVM because I was afraid Linux would be an incompatible debacle and I’d have to be switching back all the time.
… instead, I think I’ve used my Windows machine like… once. And it’s been over six months. And when I did use it I was mostly just curious about something random, and it was something so inconsequential I don’t even remember what it was.
Linux admittedly doesn’t gel for everyone immediately, so maybe you will want to go back. But honestly, I haven’t looked back, and I don’t even really think about it anymore.
i only ever did when trying vr games on linux vs windows but after getting that error i just never bothered again too much hassle i would get rid of my dualboot but im paranoid of the rare occasion when i need it to help friends or do some sort of weird windows specific shit even though it never happens and is honestly a waste of storage
I had just migrated all my old steam Library around a month ago from my NTFS drive to ext4 because I was recieving non-stop permission errors.
Other oddities were observed but cleared with ext4 usage.
The real move is to migrate away from all Microsoft products.
I’m not editing my fstab for steam. :gphn_cup:On a bright note:
I finally got my Nvidia 980ti gaming on Wayland yesterday.
I couldn’t get it to log into Wayland a month ago.This reminds me of how much I hate the fact that we haven’t had a PROPER portable file system that is truly portable, for nearly 20 years.
FAT32/ExFAT is fine, but simply lack a ton of features to be truly a modern portable FS. It’s fine if you want to drag around a few files, but for more complex tasks, it doesn’t have the right setup.
Ext4 is starting to show its age.
BTRFS could be the answer but both Microsoft and Apple are shitheads about filesystem drivers so it’s super hard to integrate with them.
Let’s not even talk about how closely Apple tries to guard HFS+/AppleFS, default drivers on any commercial OS will be a hurdle.
And Microsoft… third time trying to make ReFS happen while NTFS withers away, ancient, impossibly unusable for modern tasks due to its architecture, and licensed in a way as if someone would actually want to steal the crap functionality implemented in it.
lol i agree trust me thats why i did the same thing except for bcache with xfs, i wouldnt get gaming errors but i switched after having windows mounting the drive make it unmountable without a fsck that shit pmo never been happier not dealing with that shitty filesystem
So like I plan to install a distro on a new 2 TB stick eventually. I wouldn’t want to download everything again tbh.
And for the to-be old Windows drive it’s just going to be for MS Projects and potentially other big name project schedulers, so I’m fine not playing Windows only or kernel anticheat games.
You can add the library folder from the Windows drive on Steam, then select the games and tell Steam to move them to your main library folder.
Honestly, I haven’t tried backing up and restoring but it seems likely to work. I have however brought game files across and after copying them over I added them to Steam and the verified the files. It seemed to fix the permissions and ownership quite well, though that could have been luck.
Sounds like a good plan then. Although my migration might be on hold due to AI mania making RAM and SSD expnsive asf. I knew I should have followed my bipolar ii induced gut feeling and just buy the SSD last month.
I guess that games that can handle this move stores their config and saves with the data files. Newer games store stuff in %APPDATA% and the registry and moving that is not covered in the Reddit guide.
i dont think it really is that, the games should still work fine if they dont access the same appdata. They would just use steam cloud saves. Windows steam does something fucky that stops the launching of the game entirely
I don’t use Steam that much so I didn’t factor in cloud saves, at least steam has thought of that part.
Yes, but in my experience: Save games are synced to steam cloud and thus are available on Linux and Windows respectively. Settings aren’t migrated usually (but sometimes?!), but as long as you didn’t tweak them too much, that’s not a big deal.
More interestingly: Games that won’t start on Linux in this scenario aren’t necessarily installed on your windows disk. It’s any disk with a NTFS/FAT/exFAT filesystem that seems to cause this. At least that’s what my results were, when I tried to set up a shared library between windows and Linux when I used dual boot to facilitate the switch.
Do it backwards next time OP: post your correct guide, THEN point out fash’s lie.
i mean sure fair enough ill keep that in mind
