Both primary and secondary ssd (internal both) are formatted Ext4.
I am facing this weird issue: Some games, they play flawless when installed in the secondary drive. Some others however, they don’t launch. I have to move them to the primary drive for them to launch and then they work perfect.
How come some games are ok on the secondary drive, while others aren’t? Have you experience this?
Everything I find online points to a drive being NFTS format, but mine are both Ext4, default settings and automounting.
Games that gave problems on secondary drive, but are perfect on primary driver; Ghost of Tsushima, Resident evil 4 and Witcher 3. They don’t launch, and in the case of RE4 it even said my computer had a virus :D or was tampered when launched from the secondary drive (non-sense)
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Are you logging your attempted game launches?
I wonder if the games are trying to search for files in a specific path, failing to find that path, and exiting. Or maybe something similar. The logs should tell you.
Haven’t run into this personally, but most of my gaming on Linux these days is on the Steam Deck without anything particularly interesting going on storage-wise.
It’d probably help with debugging if you add the distro you are using into the text of your post. Also, how are you launching the games? (Steam? Lutris? Heroic? Something else?)
For RE4 specifically, Steam has it listed as “Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: The Enigma Protector”, so you might be running into some shittiness from DRM on that one, perhaps?
If you’re running on Fedora or related distros, check your system logs to see if SELinux is complaining about anything. Sometimes the security features are overzealous.
Best of luck!
What does your mtab look like? It may or may not help.
Try using a folder symlink that encompasses the game’s folder, so that the game thinks it is on the main drive, but is actually on the secondary drive. Might work around whatever issue is here.
Steps:
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Create a folder for the game: /home/Games/SpecificGameWithAnIssue
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Create a symlink from /home/Games/SpecificGameWithAnIssue to /mnt/DriveTwo/WhereTheGameNowLives
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Install game to /home/Games/SpecificGameWithAnIssue
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Run game
Thanks for the explanation, i will try. On Step 3, shouldn’t the game be installed in /mnt isntead of home?
shouldn’t the game be installed in /mnt isntead of home
No.
The symlink creates a link between /home/Games/SpecificGameWithAnIssue (dir1) and /mnt/DriveTwo/WhereTheGameNowLives (dir2). Anything you put in dir1 will actually live in dir2. However, you can access all the files as if they are in dir1 (you can also access them directly from dir2, but we aren’t going to do that here).
By installing it on the main drive (dir1), you are telling the game it is actually in dir1, and it should look at dir1 for its files. The fact they happen to be elsewhere is immaterial to the game, it’s looking at dir1 for the files. Think of it like a magic portal, you step through a door and suddenly you are in neverland. The way to get to neverland is through that door.
I’m thinking this will workaround your issue as, for all intents and purposes, everything is on the main drive (they just happen to be stored elsewhere via the symlink).
I see. When I tried the last step to move the game from /mnt to /home, it told me that it couldnt move because the folder already existed (the one i created in Step 1)
Have both directories be completely new, then install the game into the /home directory. I think you might be accidentally moving the symlinked folder around.
You can test you did it right by creating the symlink, then creating a text file in the /home directory. You will be able to see that from both the /home directory and from the /mnt directory.
Hey thanks. It does look complicated indeed. Maybe I did something wrong and I think I created a symlink and not even know where/how to remove it. I am not sure I am capable of that. I hope that someone has an idea of the root cause for this strange behaviour (I dont mean about the symlink, but rather why games need the primary drive to run)
If they’re launched through steam the sandboxing will likely prevent access to the place the symlink points to, I’ve encountered that before trying to do similar things
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