Edit: Thank you, u/solxix@pawb.social, and everybody else who gave some solid advice.

The problem is the drive is mounted with the noexec flag, which is why nothing on it will run. You’ll need to change /etc/fstab to fix that.

I used Gnome Disks to add the exec flag and now everything seems to be working.

--

I have a desktop PC, not a handheld. When I install games to the secondary SSD, Steam will try to launch the game, then nothing will happen. Lorn's Lure and some other games give me this message:

Failed to initialize graphics.
Make sure you have DirectX 11 installed, have up to date
drivers for your graphics card and have not disabled
3D acceleration in display settings.
InitializeEngineGraphics failed

Sometimes a third party launcher will attempt an install, but it usually fails. I didn't seem to have this problem until the last few months. It seems more and more games require installation on my primary drive. Many, but not all games, seem to require a launcher, which may be causing some of the problem.

Every once in a while, attempting to launch one of these games will cause Steam to crash and shut off my wireless gamepad. (GR Wildlands)

Looking for solutions online has been difficult, because most people having this problem have their secondary drive from a Windows install, or is formatted NTFS. This PC was wiped of Windows before the Bazzite install (over a year ago), and the 2 drives in question were bought new, and immediately formatted to BTRFS with no NTFS partitions.

Any help or advice is appreciated.

The following games will not launch from my secondary SSD but play fine on the primary:

• Divinity II

• GR Wildlands (also crashes Steam and turns off my wireless gamepad)

• Icarus

• RDR2

• Riven (2024)

• Roadcraft

• Robocop Rogue City

• Snowrunner

• Transport Fever 2

Here is a selection of games that DO WORK on the secondary drive:

• Black Mesa

• Dishonored 2

• DOOM 2016

• DOOM Eternal

• Resident Evil 2

how are you running these games? wine? proton? the issue is, the emulator you are using is looking for directx on the same drive

I run Ubuntu with BTRFS, no issue.

I always try to launch natively at first, then proton experimental or hotfix, then I try the latest Proton GE. Is there a way to just copy whatever the game is looking for, from the primary drive? Or somehow preinstall whatever the game is looking for?

Did you download the games new or transfer them from a Windows install or NTFS backup?

New install. Windows has never been on this PC. NTFS has never been on these drives.

I'm on cachyos and running the same setup wihrout issues. What is the mount point on your second drive. Have you set it up as primary install location in steam? Kinda sounds like you have issues with your proton prefixes, just a guess though.

so i looked into thus a bit more. the error message can be a bit generic. its a mounting issue. i am unfamiliar with bazzite. i get the concept of immutable linux oses but most of my experience is with normal fedora or debian. -- however, based on my linux experience i found some possible issues.
/mnt in bazzite is a simlink /var/mnt and some libraries have issues with that. i would ask the other bazzite guy in this thread how he mounted the second drive. can you tell me what the command findmnt shows.

i THINK the fix has to do with STEAM_COMPAT_MOUNTS

I haven't tried making the drive the primary in steam yet. I will give that a shot. I will see what i can do about reinstalling/repairing proton as well. Thanks for the tips! As for the mount point, I am not savvy enough to know how to change that yet but I just posted a screenshot of my findmnt to another reply.

Nvidia GPU?

The problem is the drive is mounted with the noexec flag, which is why nothing on it will run. You'll need to change /etc/fstab to fix that.

I think I ran into this issue when I ran steam through flatpak or an app image (can't remember which). One of the install methods doesn't play nicely with external/secondary drives

This fixed it! I used Gnome Disks to add the exec flag and so far every game has worked. Thank you so much! I will add the solution to the post.

Same happened to be back when I tried the flatpak version.

Edit: Also to add to this, I had issues recently when trying to load a game with Proton from a drive I had manually mounted but not added to fstab yet. I tried a Linux native game on the same drive and it worked however.