[Wine] Help installing software with multiple cd's

[James Mckenzie]

Plamen Vassilev <plamen.vassilev at gmail.com> wrote on April 6th:
>> > perryh wrote:
>> > > What *could* be done would be to access removable devices
>> > > (at least, CDs and floppies) without having them mounted,
>> >
>> > Nothing. This is not Wine's job to mount devices.
>>
>> Not to mount them, but to access them without needing them to be
>> mounted.  This would be a much better match to Windows, which has
>> no concept of mounting and unmounting removable disks, 
>Windows does have a concept of mounting and unmounting disks. It is hidden 
>from the user's point of view for Hard drives, CDs and Floppies, but clearly 
>seen when using USB flash memory sticks for example, or other media that can 
>be disconnected in the middle of read/write operation.

That is the application that shows up in the system part of the taskbar.  In early versions of Windows changing floppies was a challange.  This was fixed, very quickly.  This may require another look at MSDN to figure out what is called when the user pushes the button on the CD door.  The solution was to recognize the change disk light on the floppy drive.  BTW, this was also broken in OS/2 until IBM figured it out.  There was a method that was employed that did not use the light anymore as they were (and still are) not reliable as a method to detect that a disk has changed.
>
>>and it would
>> not be difficult to do for floppies and other FAT-formatted disks
>CDs are usually not FAT formatted.
>
CDs should not be formatted FAT as that is not supported by most systems.  Programs like Roxio CD Creator create a pseudo-FAT and file system.

Still the problem remains that a user needs to change CDs for whatever reason and Wine has difficulties with this.  There should be some method to send a umount/eject to the device specified through dosdevices.

James McKenzie