Using a Steam Deck to Transfer Files

FAQ
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1

My Device is Stuck on the Boot Logo

Have you inserted your SD1 card into a Steam Deck and when putting it back into your device, it is unable to boot properly?

This is a known issue - the Steam Deck is auto mounting your mSD card. This is not something that is caused by muOS, and it isn’t something that a future muOS update could resolve unfortunately.

There are multiple partitions on the mSD card and the first one is very important for booting, the Steam Deck attempts to ‘repair’ this by default.

The Solution

One solution is to prevent the Steam Deck from auto mounting the mSD card through the following steps:

  1. Copy rules: sudo cp /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/99-steamos-automount.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/
  2. Edit file: sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/99-steamos-automount.rules
  3. Add # to comment out the ACTION lines
  4. Reload: sudo udevadm control --reload

Following this, the Steam Deck should no longer auto mount mSD cards, which should prevent the corruption issue when inserting SD cards with the muOS firmware on. You’ll need to mount storage manually, but it is safer than risking mSD card damage.

Alternatively, you can use a dual card set-up so that you don’t have to put the SD with the operating system into your steam deck in order to add content. This card will not have a boot partition, and so SteamOS will not attempt to repair this card.

If you are unable to use a dual card setup, or do not want to make the changes to rules above, then it is recommended to use an alternative way to transfer content to your mSD card.

The Problem

This section isn’t necessary to fix the problem, but may be interesting for advanced users.

It seems there are two lines on the SteamDeck that run when you insert the mSD card, that seem to be the culprit:

steamdeck steamos-automount.sh[25043]: e2fsck 1.47.0
steamdeck steamos-automount.sh[25043]: ROOTFS: clean

e2fsck is like chkdsk on Windows, it checks and repairs filesystems. SteamOS thinks it needs to repair certain files on the mSD card, rendering it useless for your device.

Using Windows on the Steam Deck does not have this issue - indicating that the Steam Deck itself is not the problem, but instead SteamOS.

This is not a default Linux behavior, but instead something Valve did with good intentions, as most people would be unfamiliar with manually mounting drives in Linux.

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