Comment on External storage on Steam OS is a problem
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
The steam deck doesn’t auto-mount external hard drives (you can confirm this by going into desktop mode and seeing the prompt to mount and browse the drive contents). Normally, SteamOS only initializes the internal SSD and the SD card currently inserted (if it’s in the file format that SteamOS expects, they provide a tool in settings).
You could purchase an SD card, place it in the slot, change over to Desktop mode, mount your external drive, and then copy your games over using steam (it’s even a feature outside of SteamOS - offline transfer between storage). That would probably be the best option.
This feels like a significant downside of Linux. It’s the same issue as desktop - even if I give automount instructions for a drive, I’ll need my password. And sometimes, it’d be nice to have it happen for a first time drive.
It’s likely required because of the way any mount point could interfere with the filesystem. One thing that I always felt made more sense in Windows was its lettered drives - you start from the device and seek downwards by path - and I think I still stand by it.
Botzo@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I think this is the right answer.
If the drive isn’t ext4 formatted, steam os won’t automatically mount.
Here’s a tool that seems to be able to do it for any drive: github.com/scawp/Steam-Deck.Mount-External-Drive