Disclaimer: I am very new to Linux (1 week).

I have installed the Valve version of Steam on LMDE6. I have used Disks to automatically mount the NTFS drive I used with Windows (doesn’t hold bootloader, it is just for Steam library storage) at boot ( /media/[username]/Gaming ) and I made it the default library folder in Steam.

Running games works perfectly (actually, performance is surprisingly good), but I cannot install them due to a “disk write error”.

I looked for solutions and found this page, from which I understand that I need to change permissions to the mounting point, but when I do, using chown -R, I get a “Read-only filesystem” error for all files and folders.

I can see no options to fix this in Disks and I tried to edit fstab once, but it messed things up so badly I had to use the USB drive with the portable installer to fix things.

  • @tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    4•24 hours ago

    I looked for solutions and found this page, from which I understand that I need to change permissions to the mounting point, but when I do, using chown -R, I get a “Read-only filesystem” error for all files and folders.

    When you run $ mount, you probably see something like this:

    ntfs on /media/<username>/Gaming type ntfs (ro,<...>)

    If so, that entire filesystem is mounted read-only (hence the “ro” flag). chown (and what you probably wanted, chmod) isn’t going to affect that. It alters ownership and permissions on files and directories within a filesystem.

    I have no idea what Disks is, but I assume that it’s some kind of graphical utility.

    I’d probably try doing this, which will only affect the current mount; it won’t persistent to the next boot:

    # mount -o remount,rw /media/<username>/Gaming

    That’ll try and remount the thing read-write.

    If that resolves the issue, then the issue is going to indeed be that it’s mounted read-only.

    I suspect that there’s probably an option in this Disks thing to mount it read-write. I have never seen the thing, so I can’t give any advice there.

    If you want to stick it in /etc/fstab and mount it at boot, if you let me see the line you get back from mount above, maybe censoring the username, I can probably tell you what to put there.

    EDIT: It looks like the preferred NTFS driver is the FUSE ntfs-3g, not the kernel ntfs or ntfs3. According to the linked page, Debian apparently doesn’t build their kernels by default with the ntfs kernel driver anyway, so I assume that Linux Mint Debian Edition probably also does the same. So it’ll probably read something like “fuse.ntfs-3g”, not “ntfs”.