using a windows drive with wine

[Roff]

Hey
I have a windows drive which is already mounted to /mnt/windows
There are a lot of games installed and I want to start them from gentoo using wine, but i don't want to install them new on a fake wine drive (well... in fact I seem to be to stupid for that. I tried this very often withput success).
So is there a way that wine can start the games and what is the best wine version for that? A link to a how-to would be nice. I found some infos about using a non-fake windows drive, but nothing helped.

[nlindblad]

Depends on what filesystem is one that drive, normally, the kernel only has experimental Write-methods for NTFS, so letting your Gentoo system use it might not be a good idea (games tend to do much writing during saving/caching/temporary storage).

However, I guess it could be done using the Write-support. But I wouldn't recommend it.

[Mad Merlin]

It's generally not recommended to try and run Windows programs through Wine directly from a Windows drive, as the registry entries and such will not be found by Wine (it stores the fake registry in ~/.wine). Generally you're best off to actually go and install the games to the fake drive. Afterwards, if you want to save space, you can replace any static files in the install with symlinks (something like ln -s /mnt/windows/.../gameresource.pk3 gameresource.pk3 from the correct directory) back to the relevant resources in your Windows install of the game.

Also, as the previous poster already mentioned, it's best to avoid writing to NTFS partitions as support is currently limited.

[AdShea]

If you do want full write support for NTFS, captive-ntfs works wonderfully. It's in portage, and uses fuse and the native windows ntfs.sys to access the drive. No mangling of data more than windows would normally do.