I may have sorted this, but I don’t know how it happened in the first place. Clearly somewhere along the line here I installed (unintentionally) a game to the same directory on primary storage at /var/mnt/extgames/ (not sure how this happened) - it also got installed to the removable drive as well. So there was both a local SteamLibrary folder created at that location on the primary drive, and also as it is the mount point for the external drive. The O/S must be getting “confused”.
Overall seems a bit sketchy as I’ve also had other crashes and reboots doing this. Crashes might be due to the specific hardware, who knows. Was really hoping for a clean solution, but I think I’m going to go back to buying a 2TB 2230 drive for this as this isn’t elegant enough, but its still fund to see if it would work.
I saw that a couple of people have ended up getting their system stuck in emergency mode by missing a step or two here (usually the nofail flag). Created a video on how to get out of emergency mode and it doesn’t require live distros or any external tools https://youtu.be/-2wca_0CpXY. Hopefully this will be helpful.
@nicknamenamenick Could you please repeat the section “Note : Do not use the NTFS filesystem for game library storage in Bazzite…” section in the top of this guide? I’ve noticed that a bunch of people seem to miss it. I suspect that it still won’t get read but at least we can point to it easily.
Why? That’s a declarative statement that deserves some explanation. Most people know FAT32 has the file size limit. It’s less known that NTFS support is sketchy. I have no idea why exfat is not a good choice. For dual booters having a unified data drive would be nice, and those are the only viable options AFIK.
Edit: UDF isn’t mentioned is that a viable option?
exFAT does not support symlinks which is used for Proton prefixes heavily. NTFS and Proton is unsupported directly by Valve, but there is a wiki page on Proton’s repo which shows how it can work with caveats.
There’s an unofficial BTRFS driver for Windows that is confirmed to work for dual booting and sharing game drives between Windows and Linux.
After following this thread, I think there needs to be a little bit of clarification on a few of the steps.
After #8 (in the KDE section) there needs to be a notice that the user will be shown a scary message that these actions will edit the fstab file and mistakes may result in an unbootable state. The user will have to select OK (I don’t have a screenshot).
Then before running the command at #9 (again KDE section) the user will need to open Discover, mount the drives in question by clicking on them and entering their password. Otherwise, if they try to run the command at #9 they will receive an error that the mount point does not exist. I panicked for a few minutes when this happened to me, and a web search did not give me great results (they were all about very different issues).
It is best to make new directories/folders to have the compatdata symbolic links point to, with a separate one created for each additional NTFS library that needs one. Steam does not handle it well when moving things between two libraries that share the same compatdata through the use of symbolic links (the moved files get deleted by Steam in the process).