2009/3/9 Scott Ritchie scott@open-vote.org:
Ben Klein wrote:
2009/3/8 Scott Ritchie scott@open-vote.org:
David Gerard wrote:
2009/3/8 King InuYasha ngompa13@gmail.com:
Drive C: is not necessarily the truly central drive. I have seen Windows installs that installed on D: and have C: as a permanently mounted network share. To assume that drive C: is always what it is... is blasphemy. However, Wine does make this assumption, and probably the patch would be appropriate. Just throwing that out there. However, I have also seen wine installs onto a network where the WINEPREFIX is a network share so that multiple people can use the same program.
This is true. I've seen a Windows box at work which has the system on the E: drive and no C: drive at all. WHAT.
That said, is there any program in the world that would balk at installing on C:
No, and Vista now defaults to always reassigning the system drive to C:\ - it's not bad for us to copy that behavior.
ALL versions of Windows *default* to C: being the first (primary) harddisk partition detected, and being the partition where the system gets installed. Configurations that don't have C: have been specifically configured as such, which is still possible with Wine.
What I'm unsure of, but suspect is so, is that it is impossible, on native Windows (XP, Vista, possibly server versions too?), for C: to be a network share. I'm sure it's true of Win9x :)
This isn't strictly true with XP and earlier: if you had other drives (even sometimes card readers and USB sticks) available at install time, often Windows would install itself onto an E:\ drive. Some systems would run into trouble after adding a disk because Windows would reassign the new disk to C:\ and the old install would move off C:, breaking some apps.
In cases like this, doesn't the installer think it's installing on to C:, but then when the system boots up (with complete USB mass storage drivers, for example), the driver order could change? I know Win9x in particular involved nasty drive ordering rules (or lack thereof) if you insert a new harddrive or USB stick - I had a lot of fun setting my CD-ROM drive to X: so it wouldn't keep moving around and confusing games :)
I'm also fully aware of drive remapping in WinXP, and that "system" drive doesn't have to be C:, but as it has been noted a lot of installers assume C: is at least available, and in some cases assume that's where "Program Files" and "Windows" directories are.
On Vista, however, when you add that new disk Windows keeps its system drive as C:, even if the new disk is earlier in priority. You can also have multiple installs of Windows on a system, and while the XP ones may be happy to boot from E:, the Vista ones will also rename it to C:\ for you once inside.
If I read this right, Vista will boot off just about any partition, but the partition it boots off will be mapped to C: before anything else. That sounds like C: will always be a local disk to me! :)
So, that said, I'm not sure it's possible to have a non C:\ drive as a system drive on Vista. If so, it certainly requires more configuring than XP does, where it would happen on accident.
Thanks, Scott Ritchie
2009/3/9 Paul Chitescu paulc@voip.null.ro:
Having the C: drive always present and always local is a good idea and will save users _lots_ of trouble.
And Wine already spends quite some effort in ensuring that drive_c exists, from what I can see. There also appears to be a lot of hardcoded references to C: in the registry. I've attached an analysis. Before you ask, yes this was a completely fresh wineprefix created with 1.1.16.