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.
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.
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 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.
What if they’re on separate disks?
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.
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.
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 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.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
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.
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.
Yeah, it is always fun having a climate destroying lie machine ruin the market for consumer products with an inevitable bursting of the bubble in a matter of months to years followed by a glut of products entering the market destabilising prices and likely killing smaller manufacturers, leading the further consolidation in the hands of the few remaining companies responsible for the bust in the first place. Capitalism is great. I love it. /s
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
