I've been using Ubuntu (24.04) without any problems until I recently launched a game through Steam, which caused my entire OS to freeze. After rebooting, I encountered problems trying to mount my secondary drive where all my Steam files are stored. Initially, it wouldn't mount at all and just showed an error. I managed to perform a disk repair using the built-in utilities, and it started mounting again. However, I'm still facing disk writing errors and can't open the files on that drive—it just says 'cannot display files.' I checked the drive's health with the utilities, and they reported it as fine.
I suspect that the crash may have corrupted some files. I'm considering reformatting the drive since it's formatted as NTFS (migrated from a Windows system). I'm unsure if the file format is causing these issues. Any thoughts or suggestions would really help, though I'd prefer not to reformat unless necessary, but I won't lose anything important if I have to start over. It just means I'd have to redownload everything.
5 Answers
You might want to try using `chkdsk` on a Windows machine to resolve NTFS errors. However, if formatting isn't a big deal for you, I'd advise switching it to ext4 or another native Linux file system. It’ll save you from issues like this down the line.
Windows machines are the best at fixing NTFS issues due to its closed-source nature. If you plan to stick with NTFS, a small Windows virtual machine might help. But long term, consider switching to a Linux-native format for better compatibility.
I had the same issue the other day with a btrfs NVMe drive while using Steam. I had to run `btrfs --repair` to fix it.
What game caused the crash? My experience shows that some titles seem to trigger these problems more than others.
Just a heads up, it’s generally not recommended to use NTFS for Steam games on Linux.
The game in question was Hotel Architect.