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https://docs.bazzite.gg/Advanced/Auto-Mounting_Secondary_Drives/
Oh, Bazzite really ships without NTFS driver/"doesn't support it"?
Good to keep in mind if I ever have to troubleshoot it (and the usual workaround is to symbolic link the drivers to somewhere on bitchtree or extra4).
Bazzite has ntfs3/ntfs-3g available for mounting (this was merged with the main Linux kernel in 5.15 back in 2021), but it’s not supported to format disks as NTFS in the gui, if I recall.
You’re correct with the fact that Steam/Proton uses the colon character in file paths, which are an illegal character on ntfs, so if you wanted to share a Steam library specifically you need to use the symlink workaround. But this is specific to Steam/Proton and not a generality for e.g., Plex/JellyFin/OMV or general storage.
Yes, that all seems correct.
I just don't know anything about Bazzite, but a friend of mine will prob join Linux soon & I think he is eyeing this distro, so I read a bit questions like this one.
Bazzite is pretty great, but being an immutable OS has pros and cons, especially if you run into weird edge cases (unsupported hardware, weird sound issues, general weirdness). Because you can’t modify the base OS, you won’t have access to use “normal” methods to try and solve the problem whatsoever, as opposed to running a non-atomic Arch/Fedora/Debian-based distro where you have access to a full package manager and init/systemd. But if they’re on somewhat mature hardware, it’s basically an appliance that is significantly harder to fuck up.
If disk space isn’t a huge issue, my recommendation among friends is to use Steam in Windows to create Archives to back up anything you don’t want to spend a lot of time redownloading. Then, once in Linux, drop in a new SSD and/or make a new ext4 partition exclusively for Steam games, add it to Flatseal, then use Steam on Linux to restore from the archive file. After that, Steam will download the proton distributable and some Linux middleware, and you’re mostly good to go.
Takes a while to copy files to and from the archives, especially if one of those scratch disks is a SATA SSD, but always much faster than doing it over the network.
Depends on the network, fibre here is cheap - still slower, but also less work.
I agree with everything you said tho, it's mostly just that I don't use it (and only know my own use cases).
I’m not sure exactly how Bazzite differs, but I ran into a similar issue when I switched from Windows to Ubuntu. Ubuntu could see the drives, but they weren’t mounted, so I couldn’t access them. I used a utility that I think is just called “Disks,” but it might be a Gnome specific utility so I don’t know if it works on Bazzite. With that utility I was able to set the drives up to mount automatically at startup.
Try going to your file manager and looking for something like “other locations.” If your system can see the drives, they might show up there, and you might be able to mount them that way.
Good luck!
Your "Disks" is GNOME Disks, btw
Yeah I kinda thought it was, I just wasn’t home to double check. I’m not sure which DE OP is using, though.
Yeah I have a couple ntfs drives I didn't want to clear completely and start over with so I just created a directory, mounted them there and gave permissions for whatever the username is that is in jellyfin (plex in this case).
Quick work around. During a fresh install I just remount, give permissions and map them as a library and all is well. As with most things, doing it while being shit faced drunk doesn't make it quicker though. That only works for cutting hair
If your machine supports "fast boot", you'll need to turn it off.
Use "fdisk -l" to find the name of your drives, then you can mount them with the "mount" command
lsblk is much easier to read if you just want a short list.
& why not simply
# cat /proc/partitions
while one is at it?
Where exactly are you looking?
In Disks, in Files, or in Plex?
The GNOME Disks app will tell you if it sees the physical disks and partitions, and let you set up mounting options. Hit the Mount button (Play icon) to mount the partition once, or hit the Config button (Gear icon) to configure automatic mounting. For media disks, you probably want to mount at startup, and I’d recommend setting the “ldentify As” field to “Label” (which will also give it a “friendly” path like /var/mnt/Media).
In GNOME Nautilus/Files, you may see the disks, but unless they’ve been set to automount, there are lots of reasons why it may have failed (most commonly the dirty bit was set on the disk due to unclean dismount, fix with fsck command).
Finally, in Plex or other apps (notably Steam, if you have a separate Steam games partition), there’s a design choice in Bazzite/Atomic Linux distributions to use Flatpaks for most applications. Flatpaks sandbox the app from most of the rest of the OS, including disk access. This is intentional, but annoying if you do not know about it. Use another app called Flatseal to modify the permissions on the app’s Flatpak to allow it to access the other disk under “File System”, as granularly as it makes sense, (or just all disks if you’re a chaos demon). You can also do this using the flatpak override command, but you need to know the application identifier.
Be VERY careful, I hope you did a backup. I don't know how you have these drives managed, I'm guessing you are missing the ntfs driver to read them. Fedora probably has a package you can easily install, on debian it's called just ntfs I believe.
I assume you mean they aren't mounted and readily showing up for access. Are they encrypted?
Open whatever disk manager you like and see if there drives are detected, but just not mounted. Usually the case if they are encrypted.
I’ll have to look on lunch here in a bit.
How can I see if they’re detected vs mounted?
I’ve only done very basic Linux in the past so this is all pretty new to me.
Detected means the system sees them. Mounted means the partitions in those drives have been mapped to a local area on your filesystem where you can access them.
Depending on your desktop and settings, this is usually an automatic thing for well known filesystems like NTFS or FAT, but not so with encrypted volumes because there are extra steps to mounting them during boot (like a passphrase).
If they you had Bitlocker enabled in Windows, then they will not automount. So if in Gnome open up the 'Disks' app, or 'Partition Manager' in KDE, see if your dicks show up there, then click on the partition you want to mount and it should ask for your disk password to mount it.
lsblk will show if they are detected. You should be able to identify them by size.
mount to see if they are mounted.
They will probably have generic names, e.g. /dev/sdb or so in these commands. To identify specifics about which disk is which, look at something like ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/ and see which device they are linked to.
Open a terminal and type "fdisk -l" to see a list of your detected drives. If they are listed there but not accesible through the "file explorer" equivalent, it just means they have not been mounted.
Bazzite definitely doesn't want you to use Windows NTFS formatted drive partitions and it isn't supported https://docs.bazzite.gg/Gaming/Hardware_compatibility_for_gaming/#ntfs
You could try to see if the drives at least show up in whichever disks application Bazzite uses (GNOME uses the "Disks" application so maybe it's the same for you), if it's in there you can click the partition and see what options you get for mounting it, if at all possible.
But I think in general if you were planning to use Windows NTFS drive partitions then Bazzite may not be the best distro to use.
That article explicitly says “for PC gaming”. If OP is using this drive for Plex, that’s perfectly supported in the kernel.
Totally agreed this may not be the best distro unless they also have another disk they want to use for gaming, but one benefit is that OP could rebaseline to another Universal Blue OS, or even back to Fedora SilverBlue.
Substitute "games" for "media" and the result is the same. Bazzite isn't incompatible with the games, its incompatible with the storage format Windows uses and this article was just using games as an example of an issue users might commonly come across.
Its the same the other way as well. Try to connect an Ext4 drive to Windows and it won't see it.
This is not correct.
The Linux kernel has had support for the NTFS file system since 2021. The issues detailed in the article you linked to explicitly refer to issues with Proton and Steam, which require characters that are illegal in the NTFS specification and symbolic links, which the spec does not support.
Sure, you may bump up against these limitations in other apps, but it is a hard crash in Steam and Lutris, which is why the distro has the article.
It is correct and is explicitly detailed here:
Critical
NTFS and exFAT/FAT32 ARE NOT SUPPORTED. BOTH FILESYSTEMS CAN AND WILL LEAD TO DATA CORRUPTION UNDER LINUX. DO NOT USE THEM!
winBTRFS UNDER WINDOWS STILL HAS BUGS AND IS ALSO NOT A SOLUTION.
THERE IS CURRENTLY NO RELIABLE CROSS-PLATFORM FILESYSTEM THAT CAN BE SHARED WITH WINDOWS AND LINUX.
The issues detailed in the article you linked to explicitly refer to issues with Proton and Steam, which require characters that are illegal in the NTFS specification and symbolic links, which the spec does not support.
I dont see that mentioned anywhere in the article. Again its referring to gaming because there are probably a million PC gamers to every person hosting a media library, but it still uses all the same hardware in a similar fashion. This being isolated solely to game files makes little sense as an OS and filesystem see data as "bits" and "bytes" not "games," "movies," "pictures," and "programs" outside of file extensions which tell it which programs to use to interact with said data and how that data will be arranged within said file.
This is like claiming you can read Mandarin but only when certain topics are being discussed and not others even when the same words are being used.