Save space on your disk and use your Steam games in dual boot

Steam has undoubtedly become an application that every gamer should have on your computer and it is not for nothing that this application has become famous, because its gigantic growth is due to the fact that digital content has moved to displace the treasuryTherefore, many people prefer to have their titles available on the Internet than in a physical format that is worn out and unusable over time.

Another of the great qualities is that Steam is cross-platform so for the Linuxera community it is a great plus since over time the native game titles for Linux are increasing in the catalog. This is extremely cool, as we are no longer forced to have to rely on a single platform like years ago to enjoy our favorite titles.

To mention lastly, something that I like a lot about Steam is the affordable prices compared to the physical format and not to mention the offers and gifts that it constantly offers.

Now alone there is a small problem in terms of titles from a few years ago refers, since most of them we could only run from Windows.

En these cases we had to turn to Wine, Play on Linux, Crossover or finally to have dual boot.

At least in my case if I occupy the dual boot with Windows 10 for certain work and school activities, so I have Steam installed on my Windows 10 partition and also on my Windows partition.

Problems

Personally, I was faced with a problem, because I did not intend to download and have the same games stored in two different partitions, this is a waste of space.

So I gave myself the task of looking for a solution, I searched through the Steam help forums And it was always the same answer, the one I didn't want.

So reviewing the Valve wiki I found a fairly simple solution that personally had not crossed my mind.

What we must do is have the partition of your other operating system mounted, in my case it is Windows 10 so we must first make sure to disable Windows fast startup Well, if it is not, the partition is in a hibernation mode so it will not let us access the data, we could only mount it in read mode.

For this we go to the power settings and in the next section we do it, this also applies for Windows 7 and Windows 8.

If you can't find this section, you can also disable it by opening cmd with privileges and typing:

Powercfg /h off 

Every time we access our Windows installation, if you do not have the fast restart disabled, you will have to execute this command if you are going to use Steam on your Linux partition.

Solution

Done this now if we move on to mount our partition.

Now We only have to identify where Steam is installed both in the other operating system, as well as in our Linux partition.

Here the problem is that you are using to be able to enjoy your titles in Linux, of which I mentioned previously the paths in the system are generally the following.

Wine:

~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Steam 

Play on Linux:

~/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/Steam/drive_c/Program Files/Steam 

In Lutris:

~/.local/share/lutris/runners/winesteam/prefix/drive_c/Program Files/Steam 

cross over:

~/.cxoffice/Resident_Evil_6/drive_c/Program Files/Steam 

Now in my case the mount point on my Windows partition is the following:

/media/darkcrizt/Nuevo vol/Program Files (x86)/Steam 

Once these routes have been identified, we are going to position ourselves in our Steam folder that we have installed on Linux and we are going to rename our «steamapps» folder

I did it in the following way:

mv steamapps steamapps.bak 

And finally we only create a symbolic link to the folder that is in my case in Windows 10, as follows:

ln -s /media/darkcrizt/"Nuevo vol"/"Program Files (x86)"/Steam/steamapps steamapps 

Where they have to substitute their route:

ln -s /origen/del/enlace/simbolico destino 

And ready with it we can appreciate the symbolic link already made. Now we just have to run Steam and verify that the games that we already had installed can be run without having to reinstall them on our Linux partition.