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Before I start, I am using Ubuntu 13.10 64-bit, I have all the latest updates (including the latest Steam Beta Client).

Using the Steam client I have been unable to install or run games from another partition on my drive. Previously, the partition with the games would mount into the /media/willc folder (and steam could read/write here, I installed and ran Left 4 Dead 2) but I would have to mount it by opening it in the file system or via the terminal before hand; I wanted to automate this process.

I followed the directions from Akshit Baunthiyal on this question to make Ubuntu mount the partition seperately. It essentially just adds a line to /etc/fstab. The line I added was

UUID=<uuid> /home/willc/SteamLibrary ext2 user,exec,sync,auto,rw 0 0

and I double checked the info, the uuid and filesystem are correct and the mount point is where I want it.

After this modification, logging in or running sudo mount -a successfully mounts the directory automatically. The problem I am now encountering is that the Steam client gives me the error

New Steam Library Folder must be on a filesystem mounted with executable permissions.

So, after looking around at fstab options I noticed that the option "user" (any user can mount) also implies the option "noexec" (binaries are not executable), so I added the "exec" option after user to override this. However, I still get this error. I also tried to run chmod -R 777 SteamLibrary just in case permissions were the problem but it persists even after that.

Is there a missing option I need for fstab or is there something else entirely I might be missing?

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Found the answer to my own question with a little more digging. Doing what I did in the question gave me permission to read/write all the files/directories, but I did not have permissions set for the partition itself. To illustrate, ls -l $HOME showed me that the partition was owned by root and had no read/write permissions for "other". To correct it I issued this:

sudo chown -R -v <my_username>:<my_username> SteamLibrary

SteamLibrary here is the mount point for the drive, -R recursively applies this to folders and files, -v outputs additional information. In this case I set the owner and groups to my username since I will be the only one accessing it, but changing the second username to "users" should allow any user on the computer to access it. Running the same ls command as before I now get the line

drwxrwxrwx  5 willc willc  4096 Mar 18 22:46 SteamLibrary

This shows me I now own the drive and have full permissions. Now not only can I access the drive, but applications like steam are able to read/write as well.

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