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Derek J. Clark edited this page Apr 7, 2023 · 6 revisions

Welcome to the steam-removable-media wiki!

This utility allows you to use any additional solid state or hard drive in the same way the Steam Deck does with SD cards.

Supported media types

  • sdX devices: Traditional SATA, SCSI, and USB portable drives.
  • mmcblkX devices: SD/microSD cards.
  • nvmeXnY devices: NVME drives that plug into an M.2 slot on the motherboard or PCI-E slot.

Supported file systems

Currently, only EXT4 filesystem partitions are supported.

Adding additional Steam libraries

Steam UI

Only SD cards can be added as additional libraries using the Steam UI. You must be using the new "gamepadui" for this method to work.

  1. Press Guide on your controller to bring up the left menu.
  2. Select Settings
  3. Select System
  4. Scroll to Format SD Card and select Format

Command Line Interface

Identify available drives

use lsblk to identify all drives on the system, their sizes, and mount points.

[gamer@chimeraos media]$ lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda           8:0    1  57.8G  0 disk 
├─sda1        8:1    1 707.1M  0 part 
├─sda2        8:2    1   195M  0 part 
└─sda3        8:3    1   300K  0 part 
sdb           8:16   0   3.6T  0 disk 
├─sdb1        8:17   0   242M  0 part 
├─sdb2        8:18   0  22.1G  0 part 
└─sdb3        8:19   0   3.6T  0 part 
nvme0n1     259:0    0 953.9G  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0   511M  0 part /boot
└─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0 953.4G  0 part /var
                                      /home
                                      /frzr_root
                                      /

In this case, there is a 64GB USB Flash drive (sda) and a 4TB USB hard drive (sdb), each with three partitions, that are not mounted. There is also an NVME device (nvme0n1) that is used as the OS install drive. Only sda or sdb are available for use as removable libraries.

Formatting an entire drive

Once a device has been identified, run the following command: /usr/bin/shadowblip/format-media --full --device /dev/sda This will format the entire sda drive as EXT4, mount it, and initialize it as a steam library.

Mounting a drive

EXT4 devices that are supported will automatically mount to /run/media/user/partition-UUID

To attempt a manual mount, run the following command: sudo /usr/lib/media-support/mount_media/sh add sda1

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