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I have a partition mounted to /home and want to mount another partition as $HOME/Steam. The /home partition is encrypted and only mounted at login (not by fstab btw), while the Steam partition is not and fstab will mount it directly at boot. When I log in, the home partition will be mounted over it and hide its content. It will appear to be empty.

How do I tell fstab to wait for the other partition?

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  • This might be helpful: askubuntu.com/a/48964 – Andy Dalton Mar 19 '18 at 17:08
  • I already found this, but to my knowledge rc.local is not used anymore because of systemd. – piegames Mar 19 '18 at 17:14
  • Err, I didn't mean to suggest that as a solution, but as a root cause of the problem. You can take a look here for something related to rc.local and systemd: askubuntu.com/a/919598 – Andy Dalton Mar 19 '18 at 17:22
  • @AndyDalton I think I found the root cause is the encryption of my home drive. – piegames Mar 19 '18 at 17:24
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    Don't use fstab, use .mount units. That should also take care of your dependency problem because "If a mount unit is beneath another mount unit in the file system hierarchy, both a requirement dependency and an ordering dependency between both units are created automatically." – don_crissti Mar 19 '18 at 17:31
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You can't, sorry.

The encrypted filesystem is mounted by something like pam_mount or pam_ecryptfs. This happens after the boot process. This mount unit won't be part of the boot "transaction", and therefore ordering dependencies on it will have no effect on boot.

The best you can do is mount the partition, and then create a symbolic link file. (ln -s $HOME/Steam /mnt/Steam).

If you want the Steam filesystem to be more private, make the real mount point something like /mnt/$USER/Steam, and set permissions on /mnt/$USER using chmod o-rwx.

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  • Steam doesn't even recognize symbolic links a folders – piegames Mar 21 '18 at 9:37
  • @piegames in that case Steam must have code which deliberately checks for them :). Steam really ought to let you set /mnt/Steam directly in that case. – sourcejedi Mar 21 '18 at 10:55
  • For people stumbling on this, askubuntu.com/a/774499/68690 may be of interest – JasonPlutext Oct 3 '18 at 23:18

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