Giving a Hard Drive Executable permissions for Steam

Question

I am completely new to Linux, installed it around 10 mins ago any my first order of business is to get my HDD working. I have it set up and plugged in or whatever and there is alot of files on it that I can't lose, so reformatting or whatever isn't an option. I need to give it executable permissions so I can run the steam games off of it. How do I do this? I've browsed around other threads and looked at the stuff but some of it seems really complicated to a complete linux noob like myself.

Thanks in advance.

Solution

This error seems to be related to the permissions of the folder your disk is mounted to, for me it was mounted by the user AFTER log in, by changing it to log in at boot (moving the mount point to /mnt from /media), it was mounted as root and the error was gone.

Open the dash and find the disks app, open it, click on the hard drive with your games on it and then, on the right the little cogs and mount options and make it look like this

Now just open steam and then, from the drop down menus, go to >> Steam >> Settings, choose downloads on the left then click STEAM LIBRARY FOLDERS button.

You should see a box listing only your steam install directory, click ADD NEW LIBRARY FOLDER and point it to the location of your folder.

Now your new drive is added and it will look, something like, this

Now your Steam should ask you where you installed games at the time of installation.

Comments

[Mark Kirby]

Im not sure of your point here, all you want is to install your steam games to a different HDD than Ubuntu is installed on ?

[Kinand]

Basically yes. I'd also like the option of having some games installed on my actual internal HDD as they will run faster, ect.

[Mark Kirby]

OK, I do this, it's very easy, writing an answer now.

[muru]

Your HDD's partition is formatted NTFS?

[muru]

Just run sudo parted -l, and add the output to your question.

[muru]

possible duplicate of How do I use 'chmod' on an NTFS (or FAT32) partition?

[H. Freeze]

Check mark kirby's answer, i think it will be able to solve your problem.

[Kinand]

Tried this. Getting the 'New Steam library folder must be on a filesystem mounted with execute permissions'. Thanks though.

[Mark Kirby]

Can you open that drive in the file manager ?

[Kinand]

Yes I can open all the other files on that drive, pictures, music, videos, etc. I just cannot include my existing steam library.

[Mark Kirby]

Do you have a folder on the second HDD that already has Windows Steam games in it ?

[Kinand]

Yes, I have all my previous steam games installed on that harddrive under steam/steamlibrary/common/* and I am trying to get linux steam to recognize the steam folder as an ext library.

[Mark Kirby]

In Ubuntu, open your home folder and open hidden files (ctrl+h) browse to ~/.steam/steam, in here is a folder called eaither SteamApps or steamapps, which one is it ?

[Kinand]

Inside .steam/steam is 'steamapps'

[Mark Kirby]

That is fine then, just make sure that there are NO SPACES in the FULL path of your second HDD and steam folder, I will try to find another solution.

[Kinand]

I have checked the folder names and all contain no spaces or uppercase letters.

[Mark Kirby]

Only one more solution I can find for now, please tell me what is your current kernel with uname -r command

[Kinand]

3.19.0-25-generic

[dadexix86]

I agree :) Done ;)

[Mark Kirby]

I just fixed this issue on a new 14.04 install, please see my updated answer :)

[Stephan]

However granting executable permission to a whole harddisk is not at all recommended and WILL break your linux installation As written, this is not true. Root (/) is still a directory, and absolutely requires to be executable. Granting executable privileges shouldn't be done haphazardly, but 'break your linux installation' is a pretty strongly worded warning. Beyond that, your answer really doesn't address the problem.