Copy protection

[Vincent Povirk]

On 10/5/06, Tim Schmidt <timschmidt at gmail.com> wrote:
> An application you are running (Application Name) is attempting to
> access a disk in a potentially unsafe way.  Would you like it to
> access a safe virtual disk instead?
>
> Yes  No

A dialog like this would only serve to confuse people. If a setting is
needed, it can default to the "safe" case. People who really know what
they are doing (and therefore might want to use such an option) can
modify the registry.

Is this really about having raw access to drive letters? If it is, the
answer is simple: allow raw access if the drive letter has a device
associated with it. If it doesn't (c: doesn't), then either don't
allow it or simulate it. That easily covers both cases since copy
protection would presumably work on c: and disk utilities would work
with real disks.

If it's really about what drives the program can see and not drive
letters, then you need to store the information of which raw devices
(/dev/hdX or an image file somewhere) the program sees independently
of the drive letters. It sounds to me like it's more trouble than it's
worth then to make disk utilities run in Wine. It doesn't seem to be
something a lot of people want to do. It's not something they should
want to do if it's with disks that they care about. And, well, virtual
machines are much more suited to this than Wine is. So if copy
protection wants to do things to physical hard disks rather than drive
letters for some reason, I say simulate them and make copy protection
happy.

-- 
Vincent Povirk