EA App - Installing Games to Network Drives

Goddamn EA, with all their money can;t even get this simple use case right..

That's why you should stick with the major stores - steam and epic, not that theyre perfect, but at least they seem to be fixing such nonsense

EA uses a Background service called "EABackgroundService" - This is run as a System service, and not the logged-in user

As the default user creation of network files are only accessible via the user who generated the Mapping - EA's background service cannot see your mapped drive

I have managed to overcome this by removing the Mapped network drive, and re-creating when running command prompt as admin.. See below

Example Deleting and Re-Mapping Z Drive to my Nas:

within Command Prompt (As Administrator):

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net use Z: /Delete

net use Z: \\MYNASHOSTNAME\Games /Global /Persistent:yes /SaveCred

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the Mapped Drive will now be accessible to Every user on the Computer

Note: Windows Explorer can only Partly see this new mapping until the service is restarted, or the user has logged out / Logged in again

To Restart the Explorer (THE BELOW CANCELS ANY ACTIVE COPY OPERATION, and will close all Explorer windows)

within Command Prompt (As Administrator):

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taskkill -f -im explorer.exe

explorer.exe

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Saving the Credentials of a user with Write Permissions will permit the EA app to access the Mapped Drive

Option /Global unknown

Holy crap, this actually worked!

Thank you @192julian !!!

Never heard of SysInternals Suite, but wow it finally made this work!

@nmck16I will say, however, that due to the Mapped Drive being owned by the `LOCALSYSTEM`, or `NT-AUTHORITY\SYSTEM` user, it throws a wrench into 3rd-party tools/launchers like Playnite, which cannot launch EA games now due to permissions issues I suspect.

So this is great for people who are comfortable just using the EA App to launch their games.

***A solution that worked: ****

I created a VHD (virtual hard disk) using Windows Disk Manager, configured it as 100GB of dynamically allocated size (otherwise it will allocate all space at once, wasting space), saved it on my server in \\server\VHD\thesims4.vhd and mounted it on Windows as X:\, so EA was able to install the games on it normally.

Action > Create VHD and then, map it as X: or another letter. Then, create NTFS partition and just install games on it.

Not a perfect solution but works for me.

Ok so I have another solution that I somehow got to work. Not sure if this is easier or more difficult, i tried all the other things here except the virtual disk thing. 

I had already used the net command and px something app too remove and re-add mapped storage. I also have a batch file that runs on system startup that adds network drive (not sure which of these is necessary)

I created a symlink between a folder on d drive and the network share shortcut in my C drive. (the reason i did not point directly to the c drive network shortcut is that it gives an out of space error since I only have like 40 gigs available on my c drive.

when i tried downloading a game at this point i got a permissions error. 

I then removed ownership ( i used chatgpt for a lot of this so im not sure 100% all the things I did) from system and gave it to my user account.

finally i gave the ea background service user permissions and it ended up downloading. 

good luck everyone and thanks ea for making this so difficult.

sorry if this is hard to understand its late and I want to go to bed but i want to document this before going to bed.